Implant failure

[samarashaz]

My youngest daughter Samara was implanted when she was 1.3 years old. Now her implant age is 1 yr and 4 months old. She was implanted with the N5 bilateral implantation. Now her left implant has failed and is due for corrective surgery early Nov. My queries are:

Since she is on the high risk with the N5 on the other side too- should be remove both and have freedom implanted on both sides?

If we choose to keep the good right implant as is and go with freedom on the left side - what is the difference in hearing? is the clarity the same with the CP800 processors?

What about upgrades in the future (compatiability) with new technologies?

How long will she take to regain her hearing as it was before failure?

We have been told she needs 6 months of AVT too.
She has been showing very slow progress and now this failure takes us back so much.

 

[rick48]

Regarding your questions, the one about whether the ci should be removed is one that your surgeon should answer. My daughter was implanted in 89 and has been able to use the upgrades to the external devices. She was also reimplanted in 01 and it took 2 weeks between the surgery and when they activated her new device. Whether she regains it to the same level pre-device failure or actually does better is a question of time with no guaranty of a given result.

Can you expand on being told she will need 6 months of AVT? Do you mean in total? Why would she only need 6 months. Also, my daughter did not have AVT but what she had was an excellent speech and language therapist who incorporated different methods to augment the primary auditory-oral approach she used with our daughter.

You may also want to check out a site called the ci circle which is primarily for parents of ci children and advice regarding implant failures is often given.

good luck,
Rick