Audio test for baby with high jaundice (BSER)

Since my baby had jaundice of 361, the doctor in HUKM prescribed an audio test, Brain Stem Evoked Responds (BSER) to be taken when he is 3 months old.

Imagine the anxiety of having to wait that long before you can breath a sigh of relief that the jaundice ordeal is completely over.

At HUKM government hospital we had to book the date when baby was one month plus and the hospital gave a set of instructions to ensure that the test can be carried out without any hitch.

Because for the test to be successful, baby must be sleeping. So it is suggested that we wake the baby earlier and not let him sleep during the journey to the hospital.

Otherwise if the baby is awake, they will give medicine in syrup form that will cause baby to sleep. If the medicine does not work, then the last option will be to fix another date where the baby will be admitted one day before the test and then in the morning, they will apply anaesthesia.

Gulp! So scary..

So I was sleepless and up early at 5am plus on the day of appointment

For the test, the attendant attached 4 wires to his head, 2 in the center and 2 behind both his ears.

Initially she will apply a type of abrasive gel with a paper to remove dead skin to ensure strong adhesion.

Then she will scoop another type of adhesive gel with the cup shape connecting point to be attached to the head.

It was not easy to mount these things plus there is also an ear piece (the blue wire) which play the sound. Left ear first and then the right ear.

Thank God, baby was very cooperative and to help him to sleep, I breastfed him during the test.

The readings are captured by the computer which comes out in a graph form. For each ear, there were 3 graphs.

The results came back good! Praise God!

But the doctor did asked if I have other babies and when I said this is my first child, he mentioned that since there is no other siblings to compare with, he would recommend self monitoring.

Meaning babies will usually talk between 12 months to 18 months.

So if baby still do not know how to make 2 syllable sounds by then, I will need to make another appointment for audio test.

But for now, I'll leave it as that cos the results showed that my baby can hear so I am ecstatic that the jaundice did not affect him physically. Woo HOo!!

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But the funny thing was, a few days AFTER the test, I almost wet the baby's ear during bath... so me being overly concerned that water may have seeped into his ear, used babies cotton buds to "dry" his ear.

I was surprised to find on the cotton bud very strong dark coloured earwax.. Motivated by this "find", I proceeded to clean the next ear with cotton bud.

Having cleaned both his ears, I felt a niggling feeling that perhaps it is not safe to clean his ears... so I googled on it.

Lo and behold... to my horror!! We are NOT supposed to use cotton buds on babies ear.. Those earwax will somehow make it's way out and you just clean the outer part of the ear http://www.babycenter.com!!

And to think that we have just done the audio test a few days earlier to confirm baby's hearing is ok and here am I causing potential damage to his hearing... GULP!!

My only saving grace was that I did not dig real deep plus I was using cotton buds for babies with large tips. Phew!

So mothers out there.. Know what you can and cannot do! Google first before you do it and not like me.. do then check.. Hehe..

So cotton buds on ears are a definite no no.. no matter how "dirty" the ear may look inside.