By Khalida Sarwari
A hearing test today was successful for 3-year-old Mustafa Ghazwan, an Iraqi boy who underwent surgery at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center last month to restore his hearing after it was destroyed by a missile blast in Iraq, a UCSF spokeswoman said.
“Everyone was very pleased with how it turned out,” spokeswoman Kirsten Michener said. “It is clear that he has some hearing now.”
The audiology appointment took place at 8:30 a.m. at the hospital’s ambulatory care center with Mustafa’s dad, Ghazwan Al-Nawadi, in attendance along with audiologist Colleen Polite, Theresa Kim, a member of the surgery team, and Cole Miller, founder of No More Victims, a grassroots
organization that connects American communities with war-injured children and which sponsored the boy’s trip to UCSF.
“Everyone in the room was waiting in anticipation,” Michener said. “It was a very gradual recognition that he was hearing sounds.”
To test the boy’s hearing, the audiologist implanted a transmitter device behind his ear and used a “clacker toy,” gradually increasing its volume to gauge his reaction to the sound of the toy, Michener said.
Michener said the boy reacted to the toy by shaking his finger at the audiologist and looked annoyed when the sound became recurring.
Before the appointment, Michener said the boy was reluctant to go into the room due to the level of commotion and volume of people inside. She attributed his reluctance to his shyness and said that he was still in a good mood and seemed comfortable playing with toys at a small children’s table.
Michener said that Mustafa did not struggle or try to take off the transmitter device and that after the audiologist had activated it, he tried to experiment with sound by pulling it away from his ear and then putting back on.
The audiologist advised Mustafa’s father how to operate and care for the device, which Mustafa will have to wear henceforth, Michener said.
While the implant will not completely restore Mustafa’s hearing, Michener said that it was the best that could be done for the boy, who suffered a “profound loss of hearing” at an age when he was just developing speech.
Mustafa is able to make sounds now and “he’s got a great laugh,” Michener said.
“I’m sure he will speak again,” Michener said. “It’s a matter of training his brain to recognize what he is hearing is speech and to make meaning out of the sounds that he is hearing.”
Michener said with the surgery and successful hearing test behind him, the real process of Mustafa’s recovery begins today. The next step in the process to restore Mustafa’s hearing for the next four to six months will include tuning the device through observation and intensive speech therapy, a method Michener likened to learning a foreign language.
Michener seemed optimistic that Mustafa’s youth would facilitate his speech therapy.
Mustafa lost his hearing on June 17, 2007 when a U.S. missile struck near his neighbor’s home in the Iraqi city of Baqouba and had an electronic cochlear implant on Jan. 16. Dr. Lawrence Lustig, director of the UCSF Douglas Gran Cochlear Implant Center, performed the operation for free, with help from No More Victims.