It’s funny how quickly time passes.  Just over 15 years ago, our first child and only son Jamie was born – a bright, thriving and healthy 8lb 15oz baby boy.  His arrival into the world was a very difficult moment for me – nothing like what I expected it to be, I was hospitalised for 8 days after I had him so by the time I brought him home I just couldn’t wait to smother him with love and affection.

Jamie was a very bright, alert and extremely pleasant baby, he smiled and cooed and did all that was expected of him at the various milestones up until he was nine months old, even responding to his name and saying “Da, Da, Da, Da” every time he saw Aidan.

One evening when Jamie was almost ten months old, he became very ill.  He had a very high temperature and had broken out in a rash all over his body.  Being first time parents, we were on “high alert”  and one of our biggest fears was that he would contract meningitis. Our GP advised us to bring him straight to the hospital, fearing that meningitis was the cause of the rash.

Very quickly he was admitted.  The nurses took him from us to insert a cannula into his arm so that they could administer medication intravenously. It was very upsetting to hear him screaming his little lungs out as they tried to find a vein.  Fourty-five minutes later, the nurses returned with a very distraught Jamie, with an I.V. attached to him. The blood test results the next morning, indicated that he probably didn’t have meningitis. More blood tests were required throughout the day  to completely rule this out.  In the meantime, he had to continue on the course of intravenous antibiotics.  After three days he was given the all-clear from meningitis, what he had was a bad viral infection.

Over the next few weeks, I held Jamie at every possible chance.  My father would keep telling me that I was “spoiling that child”, but I didn’t care.  As time went by, we noticed that Jamie had changed, we noticed that he wasn’t the same, happy, always smiling, little baby that he had been before we brought him into hospital.  He became agitated, very easily, especially if he didn’t have face-to-face contact.  He no longer made baby sounds or babbled and had stopped saying “Da Da” when Aidan went to pick him up.

By the time he was eleven months old, we were beginning to suspect that Jamie could not hear us. Alarm bells were ringing in my head, that there was something wrong with his hearing.  I kept reasoning to myself that he needed to see me at all times because of the trauma he had experienced in the hospital.  My father refused to  be left minding Jamie, even for 5 minutes.  I was annoyed that he didn’t  understand the reason for Jamie’s distress (I still wanted to think that it was because of the hospital), and I became very protective of him.  We made an appointment with our doctor to examine him but he didn’t have the necessary equipment, so he referred us to a Consultant in Dublin.

That was just before Christmas 1995, when Jamie had turned one.  We spent every opportunity that Christmas testing and checking his response to noise in the hope that he would  react – even slightly – to any sounds, even if they were loud.  We banged doors, turned up the music, shouted out his name, danced behind him, anything at all that might get a response.  We hadn’t considered that all his other senses would be heightened to make up for any loss of hearing and when Jamie reacted or turned around, we had ourselves convinced that he just had a blockage in his ears that would easily be fixed.

In my next post, I’ll cover Jamie’s diagnosis & how we dealt with it.