Odessa Scott-Craig looks up and smiles when her two older sisters, Cecilia, 5, and Fiona, 3, play. She loves music, often caught grooving and bouncing to the beat. She responds with giggles and babbling when her parents speak to her.
They’re all sounds the blue-eyed, dimpled one-year-old is enjoying four months after getting cochlear implants.
Born deaf, Odessa spent most of her first 12 months of life in silence. But at 13 months old, she heard her mother’s voice for the first time after her cochlear implants were activated– looking up with surprise and delight in a moment captured on video.
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“She loves ‘talking’ back and forth with her sisters, which is amazing to watch. Her face absolutely lights up when she sees them,” says her mother Megan Pesch, M.D., who is also a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at Michigan Medicine C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
“She is now imitating vowel sounds, and has made tremendous strides in receptive language. She recognizes my voice from across the room and localizes sounds. We are so proud of her.”
But it’s been a long road for Odessa and her family from the time of diagnosis through surgery and ongoing therapy to ensure she gets caught up with developmental milestones she’s missed because of her hearing loss.
“Odessa means ‘journey,’” Pesch says. “We didn’t realize when we named her how perfectly that would reflect our experience.”
A silent cause
As a newborn, Odessa slept through loud alarms and barely stirred from noises made by her two older sisters. She was easily soothed with a laid back temperament.
“I thought we finally had a good sleeper,” Pesch remembers.
Her newborn hearing screen at the hospital prompted a referral but false positives for such tests after birth are common enough that her parents weren’t overly concerned.
When Odessa turned 10 weeks old, Pesch and husband Tom Scott-Craig, M.D., a primary care physician at Michigan Medicine’s Brighton Health Center, learned the real reason noise didn’t wake their baby: profound hearing loss.
“The audiologist kept checking the machine to make sure it was working and that’s when I thought something might be wrong,” Pesch remembers of the follow up test.
“We were shocked. We just weren’t expecting that news. Our world changed.”
Further tests also revealed the cause of Odessa’s hearing loss: a common virus called congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV). Symptoms are often minimal, including a sore throat and swollen lymph nodes, but when a pregnant woman gets CMV, it can invade the fetus’ developing brain and ears, causing irreversible damage.
One in every 150 infants in the United States are born infected with CMV, with up to 20% of them developing hearing loss and other serious symptoms.
As a pediatrician herself, Pesch had heard about CMV but didn’t receive a lot of information during pregnancy. Because of her experience, she’s working with her Michigan Medicine colleagues to bolster efforts to educate pregnant women about the risk, especially families with other children who may bring the virus home from daycare or school.
“When we confirmed that she had CMV I was really saddened because it’s preventable,” says Pesch, who recently detailed her experience in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “I’ll never know exactly how I got it, but I wish I had known not to kiss my little ones on the lips or finish food off their plates – steps that may have prevented this.”
“CMV is extremely common, but very few women know about it,” she adds. “We’ve really engaged a lot of different partners at U-M to work on an initiative to increase prenatal education, awareness and screening for CMV.”
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January 30, 2020 at 05:51PM
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Sound On: 1-year-old Enjoys New World After Cochlear Implants | University of Michigan - University of Michigan Health System News
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