Can Maria see and hear normally?

Maria has seen her opthalmologist twice now and they feel she has good eyesight. It helps that she can sign in Makaton when viewing the animal charts. She could even use the alphabetic charts if asked, as her knowledge of the alphabet and numbers up to 13 is very good. She can not only pronounce the sounds but can even recognise the written forms of the letters and numbers.

Maria's also visited her audiologist four times and had fairly thorough hearing tests. They feel her hearing is good, however there is some loss in the 4 kHz region owing to glue ear. This prevents her hearing sibilant sounds properly, so her spoken 's' sounds tend to be be unclear.

I made sure that both the opthalmologist and audiologist were of the paediatric variety. I didn't want Maria to suffer from the fear I had of dentists as a child. This probably traces back to when I was a child visiting our family dentist and being placed under a general anaesthetic. When I woke up I discovered he'd removed the wrong three teeth. I was probably around 6 years old. The next time I visited the dentist I screamed the place down. It was another 12 years before I went to a dentist again.