Bianca Birdsey, 35, tells Leigh Hermon how she and her husband Graeme coped when they discovered their three daughters were deaf.
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
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June 2017-Ausgabe von Essentials.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June 2017-Ausgabe von Essentials.
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