Miss-Delectable
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Hearing is believing - LA Daily News
In April 2002, on the same day my parents finalized their divorce, I got a cochlear implant.
After the operation, I still couldn't hear.
My ear surgeon at Rady Children's Hospital San Diego, Dr. John Vaughan, had warned me: "The surgery is the easy part, and learning to hear with the implant is the hard part."
Maybe. But to get the implant inside the cochlea – the sensory portion of the ear – the surgeon needed to drill right through the skull, then into the bony structures that protect the cochlea. That was the part that freaked me out.
The operation usually takes about four hours – as mine did – but it can last up to 10 hours in very complicated cases.
Deaf at birth
I was born with only a tiny bit of hearing – a condition known as congenital profound hearing loss. Until the operation at age 14, I communicated with hearing people by lip-reading and with the use of hearing aids, which only gave me distorted sound.
I took classes with speech therapists and audiologists – sometimes as many as five days a week during school – to understand some sounds with the hearing aids.
In class, I had a special FM system that helped me to hear the teacher's voice better. I never knew who was speaking unless I saw the person, though I could distinguish between male, female and children's voices. I could not understand – or even hear – music.
I didn't care that much until I graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine with a degree in medical genetics. In addition to being deaf, at 13 years old I was much younger than my fellow students and I felt isolated. I did not feel like a complete person.
An audiologist at the VCU hospital strongly recommended the implant and had me meet a few of her adult cochlear implant patients.
I became friends with one of them. Like most adult implant recipients, he had lost hearing after birth. This is known as postlingual hearing loss. I felt inspired that he could talk on the phone without any repetition.
The audiologist also took me into the operating room to observe cochlear implant surgery performed on an 8-year-old girl who was born deaf like me.
How implants work
Cochlear implants are electronic devices made of titanium and silicone. They have been around since the 1950s but were not popular until 2000, when technology and diagnosis significantly improved, especially for children born deaf.
A cochlear implant works similar to the way a pacemaker works for irregular heartbeats. The implant provides electrical stimulation directly into the cochlea, which is how the brain perceives sound. The brain is the organ that makes implants work for deaf people.
Hearing people hear sounds with their ears, from the outer ear, to the middle ear, then to the cochlea, which carries the electrical messages to the auditory nerve. The reason most deaf people are deaf is that the hair cells (nerve cells) in the cochlea are damaged, so no electrical information can be transmitted to the brain.
Implants come in two parts: an internal implant and an external machine called a speech processor, which is programmed to fit a patient's hearing needs. The processor transmits information to the implant through a magnet.
Most processors are worn over the ear so the magnet can communicate with the implant. But with infants, whose ears are too small, processors may be clipped to the clothing. Some people wear the processors in a fanny pack or in pockets. Magnet strength can be adjusted for each patient, depending on hair, skull, scalp and skin thickness.
After the implant, therapy can take two or more years until a patient makes sense of the signals the implant delivers to the auditory nerve. I found the auditory training very tiring. The sessions ran at least one hour every day. One day I literally threw my speech cards on the floor.
Those of us born deaf have to start almost like a newborn baby who is hearing sounds for the first time and doesn't know what they are. We require many hours of auditory training, speech therapy, speech processor reprogramming (known as MAPping) and family commitment to understand spoken language.
The younger a person with congenital deafness gets implanted, the faster the brain learns to interpret sound, especially in spoken language.
It took a few years for me to be able to identify vowel sounds such as "ow" and "ee." After seven years, at 22, I can now finally recognize the world "apple," and I feel confident about understanding something on the radio or the phone.
I had to learn how to identify each of the phonemes in the English language, something that hearing toddlers take for granted.
Hard work pays off [/B]
One day, when I was in Boston, I went to the Museum of Science to see an IMAX show by myself.
"Welcome to the Mugar Omni Theater," said an announcement over the loudspeaker. I was surprised that I could comprehend it. The movie equipment was broken, and the show was canceled, yet I was glad I heard those few words.
One evening, my mom's new husband introduced me to a sound I had never heard before - a large group of birds singing in Maui. I was fascinated.
After several years and many battles with my insurance company over the $60,000 cost of the operation, I received my second implant – another four-hour procedure – in 2007 at Children's Hospital in San Diego, so I can now hear in both ears.
Until then, background noise prevented me from hearing well with an implant in just one ear.
Now I can clearly identify what musical instrument is being played on the radio or at a concert. Music wakes up my emotions in a way speech cannot.
According to scientists, today's cochlear implants are not perfect for music perception, but this will improve with advancing technology. I'm just happy with what I can hear.
This, and the ability to talk on the phone and understand spoken language without lip-reading, makes me feel it was worth the trouble I had to go through to enter the world of hearing.
In April 2002, on the same day my parents finalized their divorce, I got a cochlear implant.
After the operation, I still couldn't hear.
My ear surgeon at Rady Children's Hospital San Diego, Dr. John Vaughan, had warned me: "The surgery is the easy part, and learning to hear with the implant is the hard part."
Maybe. But to get the implant inside the cochlea – the sensory portion of the ear – the surgeon needed to drill right through the skull, then into the bony structures that protect the cochlea. That was the part that freaked me out.
The operation usually takes about four hours – as mine did – but it can last up to 10 hours in very complicated cases.
Deaf at birth
I was born with only a tiny bit of hearing – a condition known as congenital profound hearing loss. Until the operation at age 14, I communicated with hearing people by lip-reading and with the use of hearing aids, which only gave me distorted sound.
I took classes with speech therapists and audiologists – sometimes as many as five days a week during school – to understand some sounds with the hearing aids.
In class, I had a special FM system that helped me to hear the teacher's voice better. I never knew who was speaking unless I saw the person, though I could distinguish between male, female and children's voices. I could not understand – or even hear – music.
I didn't care that much until I graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine with a degree in medical genetics. In addition to being deaf, at 13 years old I was much younger than my fellow students and I felt isolated. I did not feel like a complete person.
An audiologist at the VCU hospital strongly recommended the implant and had me meet a few of her adult cochlear implant patients.
I became friends with one of them. Like most adult implant recipients, he had lost hearing after birth. This is known as postlingual hearing loss. I felt inspired that he could talk on the phone without any repetition.
The audiologist also took me into the operating room to observe cochlear implant surgery performed on an 8-year-old girl who was born deaf like me.
How implants work
Cochlear implants are electronic devices made of titanium and silicone. They have been around since the 1950s but were not popular until 2000, when technology and diagnosis significantly improved, especially for children born deaf.
A cochlear implant works similar to the way a pacemaker works for irregular heartbeats. The implant provides electrical stimulation directly into the cochlea, which is how the brain perceives sound. The brain is the organ that makes implants work for deaf people.
Hearing people hear sounds with their ears, from the outer ear, to the middle ear, then to the cochlea, which carries the electrical messages to the auditory nerve. The reason most deaf people are deaf is that the hair cells (nerve cells) in the cochlea are damaged, so no electrical information can be transmitted to the brain.
Implants come in two parts: an internal implant and an external machine called a speech processor, which is programmed to fit a patient's hearing needs. The processor transmits information to the implant through a magnet.
Most processors are worn over the ear so the magnet can communicate with the implant. But with infants, whose ears are too small, processors may be clipped to the clothing. Some people wear the processors in a fanny pack or in pockets. Magnet strength can be adjusted for each patient, depending on hair, skull, scalp and skin thickness.
After the implant, therapy can take two or more years until a patient makes sense of the signals the implant delivers to the auditory nerve. I found the auditory training very tiring. The sessions ran at least one hour every day. One day I literally threw my speech cards on the floor.
Those of us born deaf have to start almost like a newborn baby who is hearing sounds for the first time and doesn't know what they are. We require many hours of auditory training, speech therapy, speech processor reprogramming (known as MAPping) and family commitment to understand spoken language.
The younger a person with congenital deafness gets implanted, the faster the brain learns to interpret sound, especially in spoken language.
It took a few years for me to be able to identify vowel sounds such as "ow" and "ee." After seven years, at 22, I can now finally recognize the world "apple," and I feel confident about understanding something on the radio or the phone.
I had to learn how to identify each of the phonemes in the English language, something that hearing toddlers take for granted.
Hard work pays off [/B]
One day, when I was in Boston, I went to the Museum of Science to see an IMAX show by myself.
"Welcome to the Mugar Omni Theater," said an announcement over the loudspeaker. I was surprised that I could comprehend it. The movie equipment was broken, and the show was canceled, yet I was glad I heard those few words.
One evening, my mom's new husband introduced me to a sound I had never heard before - a large group of birds singing in Maui. I was fascinated.
After several years and many battles with my insurance company over the $60,000 cost of the operation, I received my second implant – another four-hour procedure – in 2007 at Children's Hospital in San Diego, so I can now hear in both ears.
Until then, background noise prevented me from hearing well with an implant in just one ear.
Now I can clearly identify what musical instrument is being played on the radio or at a concert. Music wakes up my emotions in a way speech cannot.
According to scientists, today's cochlear implants are not perfect for music perception, but this will improve with advancing technology. I'm just happy with what I can hear.
This, and the ability to talk on the phone and understand spoken language without lip-reading, makes me feel it was worth the trouble I had to go through to enter the world of hearing.