[blindkid] Questions About Adopting Blind Child from India

[Merry-Noel Chamberlain]

Arielle,
We adopted a little girl from China who is blind - she has some very low vision.  We just kept her up during the day and soon she was on the right schedule.  It took a few weeks, though.  
Merry-Noel
 

________________________________
 From: Arielle Silverman <arielle71 at gmail.com>
To: blindkid at nfbnet.org 
Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2012 5:32 PM
Subject: [blindkid] Questions About Adopting Blind Child from India
  
Hi all,
I saw this on another list and I know several of you have experiences
with adopting blind children. If any of you have answers for Lisa and
Gordon you can write to them directly at the email addresses they give
in their signature. Or, if you prefer to respond on-list I can forward
your responses to them. I did advise them to join the Blindkid list,
but I think they ran into some technical problems.
Thanks for helping them out!
Arielle

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gordon Shattock <gpstraveller at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:10:49 -0700
Subject: [LCA] Re: Jet-lag and LCA, assessment errors made due to
vision impairment and our daughter is now home and settling in
To: LCA at yahoogroups.com
Cc: Gordon Shattock <gpstraveller at gmail.com>, "Lovely Lisa Lloyd
(home)" <LisaCLloyd at gmail.com>

Hi Everyone!
We are home from Bangalore, India with our beautiful daughter, Ana Reshma,
who we just adopted. She has LCA. She is 4 1/2 years old. We have noticed
that she is having a difficult time sleeping at night and seems to not have
fully switched over to CA time, even though the rest of the family has done
so several weeks back now, including our other 4 1/2 year old daughter. I
have heard that due to her very limited vision (which seems to be only some
light perception) that it is more difficult to get over jet-lag. Another
adopting parent suggested we give her melatonin. Does anyone have any
suggestions?
When we took Ana Reshma to an audiologist in Bangalore the day after we
took her out of her orphanage, she was diagnosed with a 40% hearing loss.
We took her to an audiologist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and she
diagnosed her with the same level of hearing loss. We then thought she had
ushers syndrome and not LCA. Well guess what? We had her sedated at the
children’s hospital only to learn that both of her ears were so totally
impacted with wax, and once that was cleaned out they tested her hearing on
the ear drum itself and discovered her hearing was perfectly normal! What a
relief that was! We are wondering if the fact that she is visually impaired
made it difficult for them to access her hearing, and if her visual
impairment might be challenging for other specialists to access her as she
has a whole round of assessments coming up through the school system next
month. In her hearing evaluation it seems that there must have been some
assessment error due to her vision impairment as we were told that the wax
impaction could only account for about 10 –15% of her hearing loss in
total.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts...
Warm regards,
Lisa & Gordon
lisaclloyd at gmail.com
gpstraveller at gmail.com


"I cannot do everything
but still I can do something
and because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do something that I can do."
Helen Keller

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