Another bad case

Last week , I took my son's classmate who is deaf to Mrs. Hudlikar. This mother had contacted me 2 years back and I had asked her to do speech therapy for the girl. But she had reasons of her own for not doing.Finally , after she realized that her daughter was having problem at school and was having deteriorating speech due to no correction, she decided to ask me for the same.The girl speaks quite well and is bi-lingual. But she needed to be better for outsiders to understand her and it would help her at school once her auditory skills improved. She had pneumonia when she was 4yrs old and due to high doses of medicines, her hearing was affected and now has a  profound loss.As the 1st 4 yrs of her life she was hearing, her speech was reasonable but had not grown enough.
She was asked to show all the audiograms etc of the last 10 years. What we saw was horrifying. There was no paper that was in place.All her audiograms were incomplete and did not match each other. The mother had done her testing in 4 different cities in India, but all seemed hap hazard and nothing could derived from this. We were not able to understand if she had a loss and if yes , how much. Since there was no proper unaided audiogram, there was no sign of an aided one.All of them told her that her left ear had no hearing left and so there was no need to wear hearing aid in that ears!With no proper audiogram, how could they decide that her left ear was no good? With mother not literate enough to understand the complexity of the subject, the child was loosing out very precious time of speech development.The child and the parents made adjustments and now with complications in school, they decided to take help.
It was decided that 1st thing she needed was an unaided and an aided audiogram to understand the extent of loss.It was decided that Ma'am's name would be used for this as nobody can doubt her expertise in the field and they would take the case seriously.Her tests were done and we were shocked to see that her graphs looked pretty good. She had an almost flat curve across the graph and had severe to profound loss in both ears. She had almost the same loss in both ears which made it mandatory to use 2 hearing aids.Earlier audiograms showed about 20db loss discrepancy!! This was most shocking to the parents and we were amazed once again at the state of affairs in India.Now we plan to fit them with 2 BTEs from Siemens.
This is the state of trained degree holder audiologists in the country.Some of them for their own monetary gains are cheating people and stealing happiness of lives of families.How is it that not one audiologist was not able to ascertain her loss without ma'am's intervention? How many people suffer with this kind kind of lax service.Are we not having a right to good service?How many people can Ma'am help and how may have speech therapist as dedicated as her? These degree holders hold us helpless people like this to  ransom.I feel ashamed of such service, but who would stand up and raise their voice? A person who does, is deprived of any help of buying maybe the tubes, batteries etc.I have done it the past with no results. The numbers in India is too large.I wish some day I am able to open a center where people can come in and leave as happy families.The dream is large, with huge investments , maybe someone up there would listen and find a way out of this.