Positive stories of improvement after grommets

[user1468575728]

Hi,

Just over two weeks ago our son had grommets fitted. He is 2.5 years old and we think he has been suffering from bad glue ear for 9 months to a year. He was well behind with his speech, very poor socially and was always playing with his ears.

Since the grommets we have had some great progress. He is constantly babbling and saying new words all the time. For the first time ever he is repeating words that he hears and has started pointing at things like trees when we are out. He is also on the whole much happier, brighter and aware of what is going on around him.

The area we are keenest to see improvements in are his social skills. He has always been very social with his parents and people he knows but with strangers and other kids at nursery he would often act like they weren't there. This isn't surprising considering he has spend nearly 50% of his life living like he had his head under water. Since the grommets there have been some positive signs. He has started to play around other children more whereas before he would usually take himself off to a quiet corner. On a couple of occasions he has babbled to other children which again was unthinkable before the grommets.

So on the whole very positive and I wondered if anybody else has had similar experiences and how long it took before their child started to interact more with other children? We know it has only been 2 weeks and he has made a lot of progress. I admit we are guilty of hoping he will immediately catch up with his peers which isn't realistic. We need to be looking at this over the course of 3-6 months not 2 weeks.

It would be great to hear your positive stories and to help us manage our expectations.

Forgot to say- I've heard glue ear being described as having your head under water so you do hear but sounds are muffled. When you say your child hears "biscuits" but doesn't respond to their name that's possible. My boy didn't respond to much but if I sang a nursery rhyme he like or turned on the tv he might respond to that. I sometimes u used the tv to test his hearing ... When he was in another room I'd turn on to to something I know he'd respond to and see how loud I would have to turn it up before he ran into living room to see it . I also saw improvements a few days into an antibiotic so again that pointed me in direction of glue ear.

You want a tympanogram. It's a quick and easy test which will tell you almost immediately if your child has glue ear.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tympanometry

A hearing test will probably be a waste of time at this age.

How interesting! Never even heard of that ... Guess because of infections we got to grommets from a different angle

Well Oslogirl,I'm actually Polish 😄.We are in Scotland so procedures here might be a bit different than in rest of UK. Managed to make a GP appointment for next week so will take it from there.DS2 is nearly 2.5 years old. Thank you both for replying,any info/suggestions most welcome.

Got date for first SALT for next week. Can anyone give me a rough idea of what's likely to be involved.. Is Assessment mostly q&a with us or an actual assessment with DS or a bit of both...

They'll probably want to observe him for a bit. See how he plays and get a feel for how he is doing. SALT then is largely teaching the parents how to work with their child. They will give you things to work on outside of the sessions and techniques you can use on a day to day basis. Things like narrating what your child is doing, games you can play to help improve eye contact, etc.

Hello everyone in the thread!
I just had my 20 month old seen by a consultant and we are having the grommets put in on the 6th December... Going private with DH's work health insurance as the initial NHS appointment came through only for February (!!!)

I had grommets when I was 4 years old, but honestly can't remember what happened... i think I stopped getting ear infections...

My DD doesn't get many ear infections but has her speech delayed by quite a few months... she just says simple things like car, baabaa, bowl, hello, ball, 'nack

Very happy to have found this consultant and gone private... less than two weeks to the surgery... happy also to see the success stories here in the thread!

Oh best of luck with it all... It's hard to find support as so much is known about other reasons for speech and communication delays but so little around this so I am very grateful for our original poster starting this!
We were the same around 20 months a handful of words and no consistent use of them... But we see progress all the time since op. Best wishes and keep us updated!

Thanks!
Yes I will be coming back with updates... DD has her nursery nativity play on the 9th so I hope she will be well enough to participate

Well my lil man went in at 10 am was finished and awake by 11 drank a cup milk, ate toast and was discharged at 12.30. Took his normal afternoon nap and it all wasn't a bother to him one way or the other

My 5yo DD had grommets fitted at 20 months. she'd been almost totally deaf with severe glue ear since birth (failed newborn check). She was quick to start picking up speech (had virtually none at 20 months), but what I've found now is that she still has a delay in processing what others are saying to her. It's as if she has to do a translation in her head before replying, and the more tired she gets, the more she zones out of conversation. She's now in Y1 and is struggling with the noise level (tiny room / 30 kids). Finds it hard to focus on the teacher if there's chatter in the room.

I'd anticipated speech delay, and worked hard with her to build her language skills (no access to SALT due to transient job), but I'd not anticipated that the tough bit would be her comprehension of other people's speech.

I think it's called Auditory Processing Disorder. Might be worth watching out for.

Hi Mynd, thanks for that. I'll keep an eye out for it. Our son passed his newborn test and had clear hearing for the first 1-1.5 years of his life so I think his brain should have developed the ability to process and interpret sounds during this period. But I'm no expert. It's true that when he is tired he does zone out a lot and go into zombie mode but I am hoping that will improve over time. He isn't very good with people he doesn't know but that's because they tend to ask him a lot of questions whereas we have done the SALT and we know that he is still at a stage where he only really understands instructions and some basic questions.

Did your daughter struggle with anything you said to her or was it some but not all? So if you have something you say to her a lot like "would you like some toast" would there be a delay in her understanding each time or would she learn to understand that particular question quicker?

I think you tend to adjust how you talk to your child without really being aware of it. I always made sure the important bit of the sentence was at the end, to give her time to tune in and have a good guess what the question was. So I'd say "Hey Susie, would you like toast?" instead of "Do you want toast, Susie?". Hearing her name was a cue to concentrate, because homes are full of people talking and not always to the child. I also reinforced my questions with miming. "Do you want your toast cut up?" with cutting action works better than the question alone.

Also, I always face her so she can lip read too. She's catching up and is getting much better, but noisy environments tend to make things really tough for her.

thanks for that. i have noticed, even before surgery that i now speak a bit louder and more pointedly to the 20 month old and she seems to be responding more and this weekend even said 2 words together like : my bowl

i guess we need to do more one on one with her and not expect her to just slot in wiht the chaos created by the older sister

It's always hard to know if your toddler has a problem filtering out and interpreting noise or if they are just ignoring you. Usually if I'm trying to get my son's attention and he is running around acting oblivious to me I will throw it the odd "do you want a jafacake". That usually gets his attention even if he glances back and then carries on doing what he was doing. From his glue ear days he's learnt to just get on with things by himself and we are having a hard time of getting him to snap out of it and follow direction although he is starting to get much better. It just depends on whether what we want him to do is more or less appealing than everything else going on. I think it's going to take a while and progress is gradual not immediate. We are 5 months post grommets so not long in the grand scheme of things.

OMG, user,that's the magic word he always hears! Jaffa! We went to GP, DS is being referred for a hearing test urgently. Little brat has fallen asleep before the appointment,woke up briefly and protested when poked it in the ears with torch.No reaction to clapping or clicking fingers but not sure if that's because he doesn't hear or he was so deeply asleep (was up half a night). Waiting game then resumes.

How's everyone doing? Tough weekend this week for us. The little man turned 3 so we had a few parties. But he also has quite a bad cold and has been tired. When this happens he tends to lose a lot of eye contact and respond less to us as well. He's fiddling with his ears so we think that colds still affect his hearing a bit even though he has grommets. It's so frustrating because one week there's a spark behind his eyes and the next we feel like we have taken a step back.

It's a case of 2 steps forward 1 step back but mentally very draining.

Anybody further down the line have experience of this? I know Oslogirl had it a week or so ago from her earlier post.

Hi yes my man has had one ear infection since grommets a few weeks ago and it was like we were transported back in time before the op again... He was totally tuned out again. I actually picked up on infection first by his lack of interaction and I was worried but relieved when it was indeed an infection... Although I didn't think you could get an ear infection with grommets but clearly you can! 😁 But happy to report he bounced back and is flying it again since..

Hello
We had our surgery a week ago and have the post-op appointment in a week.

So far things are going well, she seems more alert and interactive, but it's still early days to see a magic difference in language and stuff...

She did come down with a stinker of a cold on Sunday, so hope all the snot won't get back to her ears...

Yes I remember that, they can definitely still get glue ear when they have grommets in. My opinion is they are still prone to glue ear but because they have grommets in, the glue will drain out and not get stuck there. I remember when my little boy got a cold etc. he would go back to his quiet days but he would be fine again a few days/week later. Grommets just help the glue stuff drain out it doesn't eliminate them from getting it. Update on my boy, he's 4 in march, his grommets fell out a while back but he still has holes where they were which should have closed up but haven't so I still can't get his ears wet until they close up. But he's caught up completely to where he should be, social happy little monster pronoucation is good and not delayed in any form so rest assured your little ones will catch up eventually and he's no different to any of his nursery class.

Good to know Haribo!
I sometimes worry as my daughter is only 20 months old and is at such an important stage for speech development

Hearing test not failed but not passed either so goodness knows what's wrong.

We never passed or failed a hearing test either. It was impossible to test him because of his age and condition. Even after the grommets. So I wouldn't panic if you get a non-result. We went through something like 5 tests (thanks NHS....) and got told to come back months later each time. I had to put my foot down and demand they re-test sooner and in the end we gave up and went private The key test was the glue ear test using the tympanogram. That confirmed every time that he did have glue ear in both ears. Did they test that for you?

Pleased to say the cold has cleared, hearing is better and he is flying again. Just now starting to do more of the social things he should have been doing before like putting a baby to bed, bringing things to us to taking us to things of interest etc. For anybody reading this who is yet to have grommets put in you might need to give you toddler 5-6 months to really get going. That has been our experience. It is not always an immediate fix as some people say and even now he has a long way to go.

User and others on this thread thank you very much for all your help.Now we are possibly looking at autism diagnosis. Struggling to come to terms with it.Gutted. All the best for your children ((()))

Hi Weirdness, if that's the case then I'm really sorry. I hope it all works out for you. Did they confirm he definitely doesn't have glue ear? Clapping and clicking fingers doesn't prove anything. My son wouldn't respond to that either. He was basically a zombie when his glue ear was at its worst. I wouldn't trust the NHS as far as I could throw them on issues such as this.