hearing tests for little m

{this post was originally sent out as an email and is pretty honest and raw.}

as some of you already know, our sweet one month old m did not pass her newborn hearing screening at the hospital or a subsequent one at a hearing clinic. tomorrow at 2 pm m is scheduled for an extensive hearing test to diagnose her hearing loss, if any. (we have already seen an ear nose throat doctor who said that the issue is not wax or fluid, and that her ears look great structurally.)

this leaves us with either option a. (our preference) that the screenings were overly cautious and that her hearing is fine or option b. that she has hearing loss anywhere from mild to complete loss. it looks much more likely that she does, in fact, have hearing loss, which we have been grieving, processing, denying, etc. for the last couple of weeks. 

i feel torn in asking for people to pray- i would love to ask you to pray for complete healing, and at the same time, i fear that we will be disappointed and crushed if those prayers are not answered. we know that if she is hearing impaired or deaf that there are many options and lots of technology to help her, and that her life will still be full and wonderful, but right now, we are just sad, anxious, and grieving that our daughter may have a life that looks more difficult than we expected. at the same time, we realize that she is a gift, and perfect, that her life has already brought us so much joy, and that so many people bear much harder circumstances than what we are facing. so our emotions and thoughts run the gamut.

that said, i guess we'll ask you to just pray in the same way that we are feeling. it may seem all over the place, but- we are throwing it all out there, even if some of it is contradictory. please pray: that if she does have hearing loss that God would heal her little ears, that monrovia's test tomorrow would show that she can hear, that we would know how to be good parents right now as we operate on minimal sleep and high levels of emotion and (for Sooz,) higher levels of hormones than usual, that we would take joy in all of the special moments we are having with her and not just be anxious or sad, that we would ask good questions and have good doctors, that our hope would cast out fear, that m would sleep through her test so that she doesn't have to be sedated, that if she does have hearing loss or is deaf, that we would be able to grieve that and then process our emotions in a healthy way, and that we wouldn't be scared.