I am really getting used to this line of work. Typically, you can see medoing what the girl above is doing: sitting at a tiny table in a little booth with a baby. My job is to play with toys and distract the baby while the hearing test is going on. Sometimes, I am the person who sits on the other side of the window and conducts the test. Today, however, I saw a comatose patient. My goal was to pick up brainwaves from little stickers we put on this person's forehead and ears. The test is very sensitive to movement and muscle tension, however, so we tell people to take a nap, or close their eyes and lie very still. Even the smallest amount of movement or electrical noise can junk up the test results. So I figured that a comatose person would be easy to test. I was wrong. The person was moving around so much we couldn't even finish the test! I have tested little babies with more success than this person. Who would have thought. Well, I had no idea. So why were we testing the hearing of a person who is in a coma, you might ask. It's because this person was being treated with chemotherapy drugs, which are so strong that they can completely wipe out the little hair cells in the inner ear. The inner ear, or cochlea, is very sensitive to changes in the body, especially with certain medications and health problems. So this person's cochlea was in danger of being damaged by the chemo. It made me feel good to help keep this person's quality of life a little better, even if it wasn't very good at this point in time.
