After several months since a mapping, I had started to turn the volume up on my second implant. I was happy to begin to realize some growth with my newly implanted side. So last week on August 5th, I had an appointment with my audiologist. This time there was significant change in my map on the right side, an implant that I have had for nine months. We also mapped the left side, which I have had for seven years, and there was very little change there.
After my appointment, I went to visit family. Initially, there is some adjustment time after a mapping and I hadn’t yet realized the significance of the changes made. After a few hours of visiting with my daughter and her family, I headed home. I started my 40 minute drive and decided to see how music sounded with my new maps. I popped the “Eagles Greatist Hits” CD into the player and started listening. After a couple of songs I realized that it was sounding really good. The “Eagles” was a group I listened to quite a bit before my hearing loss was significant and I realized that my memory of this music might be enhancing what I thought I was hearing. I decided I wanted to give my new sound more of a test. Then I remembered that I had a CD my daughter had given me for Christmas that I had only played a couple of times because I was disappointed with how it sounded. The CD is “Ultimate Manilow.” I thought to myself, “Let’s see if Barry Manilow sounds any better.” It was amazing. Now I know what his fans fuss about. I could hear the orchestra music in tune and even make out some of the instruments. I could understand more of the words in the vocal. What I was hearing was pure pleasure.
You know what I will be doing in my spare time or when I’m in the car – listening to music, reliving old tunes and learning new.
I Write the Songs
Written by: Bruce Johnston
I've been alive forever, and I wrote the very first song
I put the words and the melodies together
I am music and I write the songs
I write the songs that make the whole world sing
I write the songs of love and special things
I write the songs that make the young girls cry
I write the songs, I write the songs
My home lies deep within you
And I've got my own place in your soul
Now, when I look out through your eyes
I'm young again, even though I'm very old
Oh my music makes you dance
And gives you spirit to take a chance
And I wrote some rock 'n' roll so you can move
Music fills your heart
Well, that's a real fine place to start
It's from me it's for you
It's from you, it's for me
It's a worldwide symphony
My journey from hearing loss to hearing with bilateral cochlear implants.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Going Bilateral
I started thinking about going bilateral about a year after getting a cochlear implant in my left ear. I thought about it off and on and really didn’t get serious about it until the residual hearing in my right ear was so minimal that there wasn’t anything there that was of use to me. That was just over five years after getting my left ear implant. Along with my residual hearing having dwindled down to next to nothing, there were things that had started to bother me, such as not having any sense of direction regarding where sound was coming from, or always having to direct conversation to my left side.
In the spring of 2007 I started the process by telling my audiologist that I was ready to pursue the second implant. She had recently tested my right ear, so all the medical documentation was ready and the request was then sent in to my insurance. Approval quickly followed.
My first cochlear implant was a life changing experience for me. To have that much sound was a great relief from the struggles I experienced in communicating. I had become an excellent lip reader, but that takes a lot of energy and I was getting very tired. With the sound I received from the implant, I didn’t have to work so hard at reading lips. Over time, I learned to listen again and understand more of what I hear.
Because my deafness was severe, the amount of sound I received on one side from the implant seemed like a lot and at first I had the sensation of surround sound. Later, I started to notice that I could not tell where sound was coming from. Eventually I started turning my left side towards sounds that I wanted to hear. Finally, I felt blank on my right side and I was always trying to adjust for that.
My first implant was in 2001 and I wasn’t ready for the second until 2007. I was reluctant to part with the little bit of hearing that I had in my right ear. Bilateral implantation was something I had discussed with audiologists on several occasions, so I knew that it was being researched and the studies were showing that deaf people with bilateral implants did better than those with just one. When contemplating getting a second cochlear implant, I wondered what the next big leap in hearing technology would be. Did I want to wait for it? Ultimately, I decided that I want to live each day to its fullest now, including hearing the best that I can with today’s technology.
My husband and I met with the surgeon in early July and he would have scheduled the surgery that very summer, but for various reasons, we scheduled the surgery for that fall.
On October 10, 2007, I had my second cochlear implant surgery, to give me sound on my right side. I was hooked up one week later, on the 17th. Immediately, I felt more whole. It was an interesting feeling because I didn’t know that I wasn’t feeling whole, but during the mapping when the sound on the new implant was turned off, the sensation of silence on my right side was so strong it felt like half my world had been turned off.
I have been hearing bilaterally for 9 months now and I love it. Along with an improved understanding of sound in general, I have a better sense of direction, and like the old slogan for Doublemint gum, it is, “Double the pleasure, double the fun.” How I hear with two cochlear implants is still changing and improving, and may continue to change for some time. My right ear has a lot to recover and my left ear wants to run the show. I do have to practice some therapy by shutting off the left side to make the right side do some work and get better. As long as there is room for improvement, I will keep trying to make it better because I don’t want to miss anything! I love to hear.
In the spring of 2007 I started the process by telling my audiologist that I was ready to pursue the second implant. She had recently tested my right ear, so all the medical documentation was ready and the request was then sent in to my insurance. Approval quickly followed.
My first cochlear implant was a life changing experience for me. To have that much sound was a great relief from the struggles I experienced in communicating. I had become an excellent lip reader, but that takes a lot of energy and I was getting very tired. With the sound I received from the implant, I didn’t have to work so hard at reading lips. Over time, I learned to listen again and understand more of what I hear.
Because my deafness was severe, the amount of sound I received on one side from the implant seemed like a lot and at first I had the sensation of surround sound. Later, I started to notice that I could not tell where sound was coming from. Eventually I started turning my left side towards sounds that I wanted to hear. Finally, I felt blank on my right side and I was always trying to adjust for that.
My first implant was in 2001 and I wasn’t ready for the second until 2007. I was reluctant to part with the little bit of hearing that I had in my right ear. Bilateral implantation was something I had discussed with audiologists on several occasions, so I knew that it was being researched and the studies were showing that deaf people with bilateral implants did better than those with just one. When contemplating getting a second cochlear implant, I wondered what the next big leap in hearing technology would be. Did I want to wait for it? Ultimately, I decided that I want to live each day to its fullest now, including hearing the best that I can with today’s technology.
My husband and I met with the surgeon in early July and he would have scheduled the surgery that very summer, but for various reasons, we scheduled the surgery for that fall.
On October 10, 2007, I had my second cochlear implant surgery, to give me sound on my right side. I was hooked up one week later, on the 17th. Immediately, I felt more whole. It was an interesting feeling because I didn’t know that I wasn’t feeling whole, but during the mapping when the sound on the new implant was turned off, the sensation of silence on my right side was so strong it felt like half my world had been turned off.
I have been hearing bilaterally for 9 months now and I love it. Along with an improved understanding of sound in general, I have a better sense of direction, and like the old slogan for Doublemint gum, it is, “Double the pleasure, double the fun.” How I hear with two cochlear implants is still changing and improving, and may continue to change for some time. My right ear has a lot to recover and my left ear wants to run the show. I do have to practice some therapy by shutting off the left side to make the right side do some work and get better. As long as there is room for improvement, I will keep trying to make it better because I don’t want to miss anything! I love to hear.
Sounds of the Night
Being able to hear again was so exciting and joyful that I didn’t think about what lies on the horizons of research for the deaf and hearing impaired. Eventually the subject came up and I heard that cochlear implants like mine, without the outer apparatus was the future. Everything would be contained under the skin, totally implanted. I thought “Why, what for?” I was so thrilled with what I had in my new situation that I couldn’t think about having more!
Six months have passed since I felt that way and now once in a while I do think about it. I have thought about how nice it would be to wake up to a regular alarm clock, or hear the water running in the shower. It would be comforting to have hearing in the night when I am home alone.
And then there are pleasures I remember from the past. Being a late deafened adult, I have memories of sounds in the night. Not so long ago, I was reminded of quiet talks in the dark. My husband had come to bed a couple of hours after me. I was still awake and a question for him popped into my head. I didn’t bother to ask because I wouldn’t be able to hear the answer and it was so late I didn’t want to turn on the light and put on my cochlear implant processor. At that moment I missed the pillow talk from the early years of our marriage. I laid there thinking about the joys of quiet talks in the dark.
Then my thoughts went to the deaf children with implants. They hear the sounds of daytime and silence in the night. I thought of my own childhood, when I had almost normal hearing and remembered campouts and lying in my sleeping bag listening to the chirping of the crickets. Talking with my siblings, friends or cousins till the wee hours of the morning and sharing our innermost secrets in the dark of night, or laughing and giggling until an adult would holler, “Hey, get to sleep.” Sounds of the night these children will never know.
A couple of times I have experienced the pleasure of taking sound with me as I drift off to sleep with a rare but wonderful Sunday afternoon nap on the couch and my behind the ear (BTE) processor still on. On one occasion I was awakened by the shrill ringing of the phone. Of course taking off my BTE would have given me the benefit of uninterrupted sleep, but then I would have missed an enjoyable chat with my daughter.
Someone once said to me that it is an advantage to be able to silence the world, to shut it off. Trying to make this person understand where I have traveled emotionally, that I didn’t agree, seemed a daunting task at the time. She said to me, “You just don’t know.” I was thinking the same thing.
I am so thrilled to have this technology that allows me to hear the birds in the morning and listen to the music of my youth. And for the future, for those who will experience what I have experienced, for the children, I hope for the totally implanted system that will give them pillow talk and the sounds of the night.
Six months have passed since I felt that way and now once in a while I do think about it. I have thought about how nice it would be to wake up to a regular alarm clock, or hear the water running in the shower. It would be comforting to have hearing in the night when I am home alone.
And then there are pleasures I remember from the past. Being a late deafened adult, I have memories of sounds in the night. Not so long ago, I was reminded of quiet talks in the dark. My husband had come to bed a couple of hours after me. I was still awake and a question for him popped into my head. I didn’t bother to ask because I wouldn’t be able to hear the answer and it was so late I didn’t want to turn on the light and put on my cochlear implant processor. At that moment I missed the pillow talk from the early years of our marriage. I laid there thinking about the joys of quiet talks in the dark.
Then my thoughts went to the deaf children with implants. They hear the sounds of daytime and silence in the night. I thought of my own childhood, when I had almost normal hearing and remembered campouts and lying in my sleeping bag listening to the chirping of the crickets. Talking with my siblings, friends or cousins till the wee hours of the morning and sharing our innermost secrets in the dark of night, or laughing and giggling until an adult would holler, “Hey, get to sleep.” Sounds of the night these children will never know.
A couple of times I have experienced the pleasure of taking sound with me as I drift off to sleep with a rare but wonderful Sunday afternoon nap on the couch and my behind the ear (BTE) processor still on. On one occasion I was awakened by the shrill ringing of the phone. Of course taking off my BTE would have given me the benefit of uninterrupted sleep, but then I would have missed an enjoyable chat with my daughter.
Someone once said to me that it is an advantage to be able to silence the world, to shut it off. Trying to make this person understand where I have traveled emotionally, that I didn’t agree, seemed a daunting task at the time. She said to me, “You just don’t know.” I was thinking the same thing.
I am so thrilled to have this technology that allows me to hear the birds in the morning and listen to the music of my youth. And for the future, for those who will experience what I have experienced, for the children, I hope for the totally implanted system that will give them pillow talk and the sounds of the night.
Friday, September 5, 2008
How Many Times Do I Have To Grieve?
This post is an article I wrote after getting my first implant -
I was totally surprised when I started feeling angry and sad again. After all, I had just been through a process that brought me back into the hearing world, a miracle of medicine!
I’d had cochlear implant surgery on August 29, 2001 and was realizing my hope of having my hearing restored. On September 26, 2001, I was hooked up to the processor, a small device I wear on my belt, which is connected to a headpiece that is held on by magnet to the internal workings of the implant. On that day, I actually heard my first sound with the implant. The fall of 2001 was filled with visits to my audiologist and learning to hear again. It was busy and exciting.
Yet, as the holidays approached and Thanksgiving neared, I found myself feeling angry and sad. In my mind I knew I had a lot to be thankful for and I tried to concentrate on that, but sometimes feelings of sorrow and irritation would overwhelm me. I knew what it was; I was grieving for the loss of my hearing. I couldn’t understand how this could be. After all, I had done that several times before and I thought I was done with it.
When I was thirteen I was diagnosed with a slight hearing loss. Being a busy, happy teenager, I didn’t think much about it. At the age of eighteen, when tests showed my hearing loss was definitely progressive, I began to understand it was going to affect my life. I started telling people when I needed to, and I made choices according to the recommendations of my doctor, such as where I would work, but I don’t think I really believed the prognosis that I would be deaf by the age of fifty.
A few weeks before my twenty-first birthday, I married my husband, Paul. Eighteen months later, with our first child, a girl we named Sarah, we moved four hundred miles away from family and the city we grew up in. During the next five years we’d had two more daughters, Paula and Jana, and were settled into what I thought was a happy life. Then one day, the denial I had developed about my hearing loss confronted me. Maxine, a woman from my church, called Paul at work and asked him about my hearing. She said that it appeared I was not hearing the pastor when he spoke. She had a hearing problem at one time and knew a wonderful doctor that might be able to help. Paul told her that I had progressive hearing loss, but refused to go to the doctor because they always told me there was nothing they could do. Maxine persisted and told Paul to make the appointment for me and take me to see this doctor.
When Paul related this to me and said he had made an appointment, I thought “Fine, I was due for a check up anyway,” although I felt irritated by this intervention and I did not want to go. I told Paul I just didn’t want to hear the bad news again, “You are losing your hearing and there is nothing we can do.” But this doctor turned out to be different. He confirmed what every other doctor said, but he also suggested that I might want to try hearing aids and he sent me to work with an audiologist.
I received my first pair of hearing aids when I was twenty-eight, on the day before Thanksgiving in 1984. My parents were visiting and my mother and I shared tears of joy as I heard sounds I had not heard for years, such as the crunching of snow under our boots, or the whistling of the wind blowing in the chimney. I still needed to read lips, but there was improvement in my situation and I was thankful for that.
I also felt gratitude towards Maxine and thanked her in church one Sunday. Who knows how long I would have hidden behind my denial. She gave Paul and me the nudge we needed to start dealing with my hearing impairment. However, I also had to start dealing with my feelings about it.
After I had my hearing aids for a while, it became apparent how much I had been missing and I developed a new awareness of how it was affecting my children. In trying to get my attention, Jana, who was two at the time, had developed a high pitched screaming technique that I could not hear before hearing aids. Was she surprised the first week after I started wearing hearing aids when I swiftly put her in a “time out” for screaming. I was happy that the hearing aids helped, but I also felt more annoyed and frustrated with what was happening to me. I had not yet identified what I was feeling and being an optimistic person, I just did my best to move on.
My doctor recommended I have annual checkups and I tried to follow his advice. Every year I would make an appointment, my hearing would be tested and the result was always a little worse. I lost some of the high pitched sounds that hearing aids initially gave back to me. I couldn’t hear the phone ring so we added a louder ringer and because I had difficulty understanding speech, we also added a volume control so I could turn the sound way up on the phone. After five years I needed stronger hearing aids and my ability to deal with this positively was wearing down. Once again I had reached a point where I just couldn’t bear the repetition of this news. I began to procrastinate with my appointments and they stretched out to every eighteen months.
In 1992, while visiting with my friend, Barb, I happened to mention that I was due for another check up and was having a hard time motivating myself to get it done, as it was hard to hear that negative news again. She then asked me if I had grieved over the loss of my hearing. Barb explained further that she had read an article about how people that have lost a part of themselves, such as a limb in an accident or a breast to cancer, go through the grieving process over that loss. As we talked about it I realized that those were feelings I had experienced. However, because I assumed a person grieves for something or someone only once, I assured her that I had been there and done that. I figured I had already grieved – and I had.
Sadly I discovered that it is a process that can be repeated. After my next appointment, when once again I needed stronger hearing aids, I went through the anger and sadness all over again. Why me? I would ask myself. With time, I worked through the feelings until I could ask myself, – Why not me?
I finally told my doctor that I couldn’t go through the process every year. He responded that a check up every other year would be fine. We also discussed the possibility of the cochlear implant. I had been hearing wonderful things about it and I became hopeful that it might work for me. But my doctor wanted me to wait, as he believed anything natural would be better than what he believed was the unnatural sound of the implant. I supposed he was right and I also knew that the technology would continue to improve while I waited.
The stronger hearing aids helped for a while and eased my frustration for a few years. Then, in 1998, I decided that I was ready to know more about the implant and whether I was a candidate. By this time I had reached the point where I could not tell the difference between my daughters’ names on the phone. All I could hear were the vowel sounds which sounded the same for each one, “Ah, ah; Ah, ah; and Ah, ah.” I stopped answering the phone altogether and only talked on it with family.
When I looked into the cochlear implant I did some research on the internet and asked a hearing impaired acquaintance what she knew about it. I had the impression that the University of Iowa was on the cutting edge of this technology and arranged to be tested there. What I learned made me very hopeful, but I didn’t meet the criteria. I couldn’t believe it! I had less than twenty per cent hearing left in either ear and hearing aids did little to help me. How deaf did I have to be? I was angry at my situation and getting very tired of having to work so hard at communication. With no other choice, I went on and tried to follow the recommendation from the audiologist to wear my hearing aids with the volume turned up higher.
In the spring of 2001, I noticed that the ringing in my left ear was increasing. I would have moments when it was so loud I didn’t know if I could stand it and then it would suddenly quit. Deep down inside I knew that the little bit of hearing I had in that ear was leaving me. I tried to pretend that it wasn’t really happening, but the realities didn’t allow me to do this for long. I had stopped trying to listen to music because none of it sounded good. I quit attending church and other social functions because it was becoming almost impossible to follow the service or keep up with conversation. Reading lips took all of my concentration. I was tired of compensating. It was time to make a decision. If I didn’t qualify for the implant now, then my family and I would learn sign language.
I asked Paul to make an appointment with my doctor. The audiologist examined me first. It was during the testing that I knew for sure there was a big change. The audiologist did something that had never been done with me before. She brought in the pictures so I would have visual clues for the words she was saying. I wanted to cry. Instead, I took a deep breath and got through the test. When I finally saw my doctor, I really wasn’t surprised when he told me that I didn’t have any hearing left in my left ear and there was about fourteen per cent in my right. I made myself breathe and asked about the cochlear implant. My doctor said he didn’t do that surgery anymore, but he could give me some names. He agreed that it was time to look into it.
The Mayo Clinic is not far from where I live so I decided to start there. With a referral, I had my first appointment in July of 2001. After the tests that are required by the FDA, I was told that I met the criteria and was a good candidate for cochlear implant surgery. The surgery was scheduled for August.
Hallelujah, something could now be done. Oh God, I could hardly believe I’d become deaf. Sometimes my emotions were so conflicting, I felt sick to my stomach. A few people, who knew this was my hope, congratulated me for qualifying. That felt weird, and sometimes I just didn’t know what to say, “Thanks, I am deaf?” Getting to the other side of the surgery was looking good. I was anxious for it.
I was fortunate. The surgery to place the cochlear implant went well. My recovery was trouble free, and the day I was hooked up to the external processor was exciting. I heard high pitched tones I hadn’t heard in twenty years.
Some sounds were not as I remembered them, and some I didn’t understand or recognize. The first three days were the most confusing. My brain needed time to sort things out the same way damaged bodies recover in physical therapy, with repetition and practice. On the fourth day, some of the sounds started to make sense. Although people sounded like they were talking into a tin can, I started to recognize a word here and there without reading lips. Improvement continued through October and into November and friends and family started sounding more as I remembered them. I was learning to hear again, so it really was quite a surprise to me when I had trouble feeling happy; when all I could feel was anger because I had to wear this headpiece and sound processor; or this tremendous sadness because when I took it off at the end of the day I heard nothing at all. How could this be? I should have been happy. Medical technology found a way to give me back sound in my lifetime.
During the period of time I was feeling all this, I had an appointment with Julie, my audiologist. She has become a good friend and on that day, she was a good counselor. I told her about the emotions I was experiencing and she listened like the pro that she is. Then she told me just what I needed to hear. All those feelings are normal and just about all of her patients talk about their anger at one time or another.
At that session I started to feel better. With each new day after that, I left those feelings farther and farther behind me. Am I done grieving for the loss of my hearing? I hope so.
Now I am celebrating. I am no longer distraught by the thought that I will never hear my grandchildren when they come along. I can hear the little voices; I can talk to my family on the phone; I can hear my cat meow; I can hear the rain. In the morning, when I step out the door on my way to work and I hear the birds singing, I can hardly believe it. It has been a long time since I have known this kind of happiness. Sound is beautiful. Life is beautiful. There is joy.
I was totally surprised when I started feeling angry and sad again. After all, I had just been through a process that brought me back into the hearing world, a miracle of medicine!
I’d had cochlear implant surgery on August 29, 2001 and was realizing my hope of having my hearing restored. On September 26, 2001, I was hooked up to the processor, a small device I wear on my belt, which is connected to a headpiece that is held on by magnet to the internal workings of the implant. On that day, I actually heard my first sound with the implant. The fall of 2001 was filled with visits to my audiologist and learning to hear again. It was busy and exciting.
Yet, as the holidays approached and Thanksgiving neared, I found myself feeling angry and sad. In my mind I knew I had a lot to be thankful for and I tried to concentrate on that, but sometimes feelings of sorrow and irritation would overwhelm me. I knew what it was; I was grieving for the loss of my hearing. I couldn’t understand how this could be. After all, I had done that several times before and I thought I was done with it.
When I was thirteen I was diagnosed with a slight hearing loss. Being a busy, happy teenager, I didn’t think much about it. At the age of eighteen, when tests showed my hearing loss was definitely progressive, I began to understand it was going to affect my life. I started telling people when I needed to, and I made choices according to the recommendations of my doctor, such as where I would work, but I don’t think I really believed the prognosis that I would be deaf by the age of fifty.
A few weeks before my twenty-first birthday, I married my husband, Paul. Eighteen months later, with our first child, a girl we named Sarah, we moved four hundred miles away from family and the city we grew up in. During the next five years we’d had two more daughters, Paula and Jana, and were settled into what I thought was a happy life. Then one day, the denial I had developed about my hearing loss confronted me. Maxine, a woman from my church, called Paul at work and asked him about my hearing. She said that it appeared I was not hearing the pastor when he spoke. She had a hearing problem at one time and knew a wonderful doctor that might be able to help. Paul told her that I had progressive hearing loss, but refused to go to the doctor because they always told me there was nothing they could do. Maxine persisted and told Paul to make the appointment for me and take me to see this doctor.
When Paul related this to me and said he had made an appointment, I thought “Fine, I was due for a check up anyway,” although I felt irritated by this intervention and I did not want to go. I told Paul I just didn’t want to hear the bad news again, “You are losing your hearing and there is nothing we can do.” But this doctor turned out to be different. He confirmed what every other doctor said, but he also suggested that I might want to try hearing aids and he sent me to work with an audiologist.
I received my first pair of hearing aids when I was twenty-eight, on the day before Thanksgiving in 1984. My parents were visiting and my mother and I shared tears of joy as I heard sounds I had not heard for years, such as the crunching of snow under our boots, or the whistling of the wind blowing in the chimney. I still needed to read lips, but there was improvement in my situation and I was thankful for that.
I also felt gratitude towards Maxine and thanked her in church one Sunday. Who knows how long I would have hidden behind my denial. She gave Paul and me the nudge we needed to start dealing with my hearing impairment. However, I also had to start dealing with my feelings about it.
After I had my hearing aids for a while, it became apparent how much I had been missing and I developed a new awareness of how it was affecting my children. In trying to get my attention, Jana, who was two at the time, had developed a high pitched screaming technique that I could not hear before hearing aids. Was she surprised the first week after I started wearing hearing aids when I swiftly put her in a “time out” for screaming. I was happy that the hearing aids helped, but I also felt more annoyed and frustrated with what was happening to me. I had not yet identified what I was feeling and being an optimistic person, I just did my best to move on.
My doctor recommended I have annual checkups and I tried to follow his advice. Every year I would make an appointment, my hearing would be tested and the result was always a little worse. I lost some of the high pitched sounds that hearing aids initially gave back to me. I couldn’t hear the phone ring so we added a louder ringer and because I had difficulty understanding speech, we also added a volume control so I could turn the sound way up on the phone. After five years I needed stronger hearing aids and my ability to deal with this positively was wearing down. Once again I had reached a point where I just couldn’t bear the repetition of this news. I began to procrastinate with my appointments and they stretched out to every eighteen months.
In 1992, while visiting with my friend, Barb, I happened to mention that I was due for another check up and was having a hard time motivating myself to get it done, as it was hard to hear that negative news again. She then asked me if I had grieved over the loss of my hearing. Barb explained further that she had read an article about how people that have lost a part of themselves, such as a limb in an accident or a breast to cancer, go through the grieving process over that loss. As we talked about it I realized that those were feelings I had experienced. However, because I assumed a person grieves for something or someone only once, I assured her that I had been there and done that. I figured I had already grieved – and I had.
Sadly I discovered that it is a process that can be repeated. After my next appointment, when once again I needed stronger hearing aids, I went through the anger and sadness all over again. Why me? I would ask myself. With time, I worked through the feelings until I could ask myself, – Why not me?
I finally told my doctor that I couldn’t go through the process every year. He responded that a check up every other year would be fine. We also discussed the possibility of the cochlear implant. I had been hearing wonderful things about it and I became hopeful that it might work for me. But my doctor wanted me to wait, as he believed anything natural would be better than what he believed was the unnatural sound of the implant. I supposed he was right and I also knew that the technology would continue to improve while I waited.
The stronger hearing aids helped for a while and eased my frustration for a few years. Then, in 1998, I decided that I was ready to know more about the implant and whether I was a candidate. By this time I had reached the point where I could not tell the difference between my daughters’ names on the phone. All I could hear were the vowel sounds which sounded the same for each one, “Ah, ah; Ah, ah; and Ah, ah.” I stopped answering the phone altogether and only talked on it with family.
When I looked into the cochlear implant I did some research on the internet and asked a hearing impaired acquaintance what she knew about it. I had the impression that the University of Iowa was on the cutting edge of this technology and arranged to be tested there. What I learned made me very hopeful, but I didn’t meet the criteria. I couldn’t believe it! I had less than twenty per cent hearing left in either ear and hearing aids did little to help me. How deaf did I have to be? I was angry at my situation and getting very tired of having to work so hard at communication. With no other choice, I went on and tried to follow the recommendation from the audiologist to wear my hearing aids with the volume turned up higher.
In the spring of 2001, I noticed that the ringing in my left ear was increasing. I would have moments when it was so loud I didn’t know if I could stand it and then it would suddenly quit. Deep down inside I knew that the little bit of hearing I had in that ear was leaving me. I tried to pretend that it wasn’t really happening, but the realities didn’t allow me to do this for long. I had stopped trying to listen to music because none of it sounded good. I quit attending church and other social functions because it was becoming almost impossible to follow the service or keep up with conversation. Reading lips took all of my concentration. I was tired of compensating. It was time to make a decision. If I didn’t qualify for the implant now, then my family and I would learn sign language.
I asked Paul to make an appointment with my doctor. The audiologist examined me first. It was during the testing that I knew for sure there was a big change. The audiologist did something that had never been done with me before. She brought in the pictures so I would have visual clues for the words she was saying. I wanted to cry. Instead, I took a deep breath and got through the test. When I finally saw my doctor, I really wasn’t surprised when he told me that I didn’t have any hearing left in my left ear and there was about fourteen per cent in my right. I made myself breathe and asked about the cochlear implant. My doctor said he didn’t do that surgery anymore, but he could give me some names. He agreed that it was time to look into it.
The Mayo Clinic is not far from where I live so I decided to start there. With a referral, I had my first appointment in July of 2001. After the tests that are required by the FDA, I was told that I met the criteria and was a good candidate for cochlear implant surgery. The surgery was scheduled for August.
Hallelujah, something could now be done. Oh God, I could hardly believe I’d become deaf. Sometimes my emotions were so conflicting, I felt sick to my stomach. A few people, who knew this was my hope, congratulated me for qualifying. That felt weird, and sometimes I just didn’t know what to say, “Thanks, I am deaf?” Getting to the other side of the surgery was looking good. I was anxious for it.
I was fortunate. The surgery to place the cochlear implant went well. My recovery was trouble free, and the day I was hooked up to the external processor was exciting. I heard high pitched tones I hadn’t heard in twenty years.
Some sounds were not as I remembered them, and some I didn’t understand or recognize. The first three days were the most confusing. My brain needed time to sort things out the same way damaged bodies recover in physical therapy, with repetition and practice. On the fourth day, some of the sounds started to make sense. Although people sounded like they were talking into a tin can, I started to recognize a word here and there without reading lips. Improvement continued through October and into November and friends and family started sounding more as I remembered them. I was learning to hear again, so it really was quite a surprise to me when I had trouble feeling happy; when all I could feel was anger because I had to wear this headpiece and sound processor; or this tremendous sadness because when I took it off at the end of the day I heard nothing at all. How could this be? I should have been happy. Medical technology found a way to give me back sound in my lifetime.
During the period of time I was feeling all this, I had an appointment with Julie, my audiologist. She has become a good friend and on that day, she was a good counselor. I told her about the emotions I was experiencing and she listened like the pro that she is. Then she told me just what I needed to hear. All those feelings are normal and just about all of her patients talk about their anger at one time or another.
At that session I started to feel better. With each new day after that, I left those feelings farther and farther behind me. Am I done grieving for the loss of my hearing? I hope so.
Now I am celebrating. I am no longer distraught by the thought that I will never hear my grandchildren when they come along. I can hear the little voices; I can talk to my family on the phone; I can hear my cat meow; I can hear the rain. In the morning, when I step out the door on my way to work and I hear the birds singing, I can hardly believe it. It has been a long time since I have known this kind of happiness. Sound is beautiful. Life is beautiful. There is joy.
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