‘Our Lives Changed After The Diagnosis'

Bianca Birdsey, 35, tells Leigh Hermon how she and her husband Graeme coped when they discovered their three daughters were deaf.

- Leigh Hermon

When our twin daughters, Hadassah and Tahlita, were born in 2010, they were two happy, bouncing baby girls and they hit all their developmental milestones without a hitch. Graeme and I are medical doctors, and they seemed like two typical baby girls. But it wasn’t until they were 18 months old that I started to wonder if there was something wrong.

Around about the same time, our third daughter, Eden, was born, so there was a lot going on in our home. Even though the twins happily communicated with each other, I noticed they’d plateaued in terms of their vocabulary, and it was difficult to get their attention. I was naturally concerned so I chatted to a few specialists to see if they had any answers. We were living in rural KZN at the time, so a lot of my appointments were over the phone. I was also given a few speech and language therapy exercises to do with the girls, which I did with them religiously every afternoon, but the specialists told us to ‘wait and see’ until the twins were older.

Every time I opened Facebook I’d see a new post from one of my friends showing off the latest song their child had learned. It only made me worry more: I could see that Hadassah and Tahlita were lagging far behind their peers with language. I knew something was wrong, but I never suspected that they could be deaf.

Facing the facts