Let's Get Down to Business

Good evening ladies and gents and welcome to the next installment of Kentucky Adventures, staring all your returning favorites from previous posts.

Today their was a certain excitement in the air as us girls were getting ready this morning, because today would be the first day in which we were working on hearing screenings in Berea College's Child Development Lab, better known as the CDL. We headed off to the dining hall for a nice breakfast; Berea's strawberries are just to die for! After our light breakfast we headed over to the CDL where we met up with another couple of our lovely hosts, Wilma Chambers and Melissa Rediford, who we met on Monday. After some initial greetings we made our way upstairs to our screening area in a huge conference room upstairs. 

We were greeted by this lovely message as we entered the building. :) 

Once upstairs we set up all of our equipment and got the room ready for our kiddos; we even drew a cute little picture on the board for them to look at while we took over their ears. As soon as we finished setting up we had some of our first clients come into the room. Most were shy at first, but after we played around and won them over with our smiles they relaxed enough to cooperate with our screening needs. 

Now the screening system we use starts off with Otoscopy. This is where we use an otoscope (pictured below) to look into the child's ear and make sure the ear drum and ear canal are intact and not blocked by any pesky cerumen (ear wax). 

an otoscope, similar to the one we use for the screenings

After making sure the ear drum and ear canal are all set, we move on to Tympanometry. This is a test that measures how well the ear drum is working. The typanomenter is a handheld machine with a soft probe tip at the end that is inserted into each ear and takes only seconds to calculate. Most of our children showed Type A or normal tympanograms, which was great. A couple of children's tympanograms were Type B, a flat tymp, which suggests that they may have some middle ear pathology. In this case we noted it on our records and will be sure to refer where necessary. 

This is what the tympanometer we use looks like.

After Tympanometry we move onto Otoacoustic Emissions (OAE). This screens hearing in a range of sound frequencies critical for normal speech and language development, in a quick and painless procedure. A soft tip (like an ear plug) is rolled up tight and inserted into the ear and then the machine tests the child's hearing without needing a behavioral response (a raised hand or ball in a bucket). The hardest part of this test was getting some of our more chatty tikes to keep quiet long enough for the machine to do its work. 

This is what our OAE system look like, its only missing the cord that attaches to the piece that goes in the ear.

Last, but not least, we do Pure Tone Audiometry. This involves conditioning the child to respond to beep like sounds that comes at different levels of loudness and varying frequencies. The hardest part of this test is teaching the child to raise their hand/wave at us or, for the littler ones, throwing a ball in a bucket, when they hear the sounds, and only when they hear the sounds. Overall, this went really well and we only had one child who could not be conditioned to respond to the tones. 

Our portable audiometer looks like this. 

We spent the morning screening some of the younger preschoolers, 3-5 year old's, and then after a lunch break and nap time for the not only the little ones, but also us college girls, we screened the hearing of some of the CDL's school age children. 

So after an eventful and busy day screening some of our new friends at the CDL, Jill and I took a nice walk back to the dorm and then met up with the rest of the group before we headed off to dinner. We found a BBQ place off the main interstate and tried some of the local pulled pork, pulled chicken, ribs, and vegetables. It hit the spot and we left feeling pretty full. Now us girls are all hanging out and tucked into our home away from home for the night. 

Make sure to keep reading for our tails from Kentucky!

Night Y'all,

Hailey