Beyond the sound

Three-year-old Ostap Panych doctors for a year unsuccessfully treated for autism. The child underwent courses of drug stimulation of the brain, exciting nervous activity and sometimes painful, took a huge number of medicines, which, as it turned out, were unnecessary to him. And only very recently the child showed a bilateral sensorineural hearing loss of the 4th degree. It turned out that Ostap simply did not hear his parents and peers and because of that, he could not communicate with them! There was no autism in the child. Now it urgently needs to be operated - and with the help of expensive cochlear implants to restore hearing.

In the center of early development of children, where there are three-year-old kids, the nimble Ostap is scurrying with cruising speed. His eyes glittered briskly, and the toy dump truck that fell into the hands immediately turned into a loud "rattle" - the kid gladly screams at them, issuing a sharp and loud sound. Next, the teacher starts a dance lesson, the children clap their hands, they dance, but Ostap does not break away from the toy. It seems that he does not care what happens around.

A few months ago, parents intensively treated their child with autism. This diagnosis was put to their little son by a psychiatrist - after a seemingly thorough examination of the child. The boy did not respond to the name, did not fulfill requests, did not speak. Having read all sorts of "horror stories" on the Internet, Larisa Panych, Ostap's mother, was ready to do everything possible and impossible, only to return the child's speech and give a chance to fully develop. The boy was given painful injections of kartoksin, gave strong stimulating syrups, but drugs effective to treat autism in other children, in his case, were powerless. And this led to despair!

In the family, Panych Ostap is the only and such a long-awaited child ... Nicholaj and Larisa after the wedding dreamed of a son, their wishes came true, and at first, nothing boded ill. But in the second half of pregnancy doctors insisted on Larissa's hospitalization and, in order to save the child, she went to the clinic, where she scrupulously complied the doctors' instructions.

Soon Larissa was operated, made a cesarean section, and Ostap was born. He was very tiny - 1 kg 250 grams, but looked seemingly plump, like a normal newborn, and screamed himself. Some serious pathologies were not found by doctors and two months later they were ready to let other go home with her baby. Buton the last day they decided to check his eyesight and it turned out that Ostap is progressing with retinopathy, which threatens the child with blindness. They did the operation, and the baby began to see normally.In the department for premature babies, Larissa heard dozens of happy stories, saw how handsome and clever grew up like her Ostap children, and hoped for the best.

The boy really grew strong. Until a year and eight months, he developed normally, learned to crawl and walk in time, began to babble, pronounced "mama", could show where the nose was, eyes: the child heard and gradually learned to speak. But already in a year and 10 months, Ostap seemed to have stopped in development. In two years the kid already said nothing, even the word "mother" was lost. Concerned Larissa turned to the doctors.

At first, none of them shared her alarm. Consoled that Ostap was born small, and that the delay in speech development in this case is natural. The neurologist even told Larisa that she was to blame for everything - she exaggerates the problem. And then, she decided to put up, she thought that she was probably overreacting. But time passed, and the child did not develop, and more and more verdicts of doctors appeared in Ostap's card: speech therapists, defectologists, who still assured my mother that it was worth a little longer to wait and the child would speak. Finally, the psychiatrist Larissa addressed, tested the baby and diagnosed alalia (similar to autism), that is, the absence of speech related to brain damage, after which it was time for a long-almost-year-intensive treatment in her native Kherson, and then in the capital's clinics.

Once Larissa told her husband: maybe our Ostap does not hear? Has spoken from a despair, not seriously. Nikolay immediately replied: it's okay, we'll put him a hearing aid, and he will hear! After all the diagnosed diagnoses, the problem of hearing seemed to him small... Larissa took the child and went with him to Odessa - the center of hearing and speech. They spent there with the baby for almost three hours, hitting the doctors there with a bouquet of their diagnoses. In one of the offices the doctor dressed Ostap with very strong sound equipment - the boy heard the signal, and for the first time in the last year he reacted to it. It turned out that Ostap practically does not hear.

The boy was repeatedly checked by the audiologists, examined the hearing four or five times a year, and each time they wrote in the card - "age norm". With this recall, Larissa continued to treat the child. But the conclusion of the Odessa doctors killed my mother. Larissa then said: "4-5 degree of deafness is the threshold of deafness. Hearing aids to a child will not help, you need to do an operation, implant a cochlear implant. " For Ostap's parents it was a shock! They've lost so much time! They wanted to get the son out of his condition, but it turned out that the whole year they were treating the child to harm him.

Larissa says she feels guilty before her son, but does not blame the doctors for their negligence. The past can not be changed, it is necessary to strive to restore hearing, to make the cochlear implantation recommended by doctors, which, alas, is prohibitively expensive. However, only this operation will return the child a normal hearing and will allow him to give him a healthy and happy future.

Then Ostap, will hear how his mother's heart beats and how his father in a low voice reads fairy tales to him. Then Ostap easily discerns the whisper of my mother's kiss and can clearly say in response: "Good night, Mommy."

Name: Panych Ostap, 08.09.2014

City: Kherson

Diagnosis: bilateral sensory-neural deafness of the 4th degree