I'm glad to find this discussion. I was hearing until I was 30 years old. I have been deaf for 21 years and I really don't want a CI. I thought about it a lot. I'm a little bit like RavenSteve in that I still have some hearing in one ear. I'm stone deaf in one ear and 110 db in my "good" ear. The thing I know about being able to hear from both ears is something called "triangulation". Hearing people can hear, but triangulation allows them to know where the sound is coming from. I think cats are a good example to use to observe how tirangulation works.. If you watch a cat when they are prowling around, you see their ears turn in different directions. There hearing is Very sensitive and they turn their ears to "triangulate" and determine where tiny noises are coming from.
If I understand CI technology correctly, this "triangulation" is not something a CI can do, even if you have a CI is in both ears. I don't know for sure, but it sees to me that if you had a CI in both ears you would have to spend a lot more time adjusting the volume. Just doing it with one H.A. is enough for me. It bugs me because the level of noise changes so much, I'm always adjusting. Actually, I just don't like drawing attention to myself when I adjust the volume (I'm might be flirting with someone at the time
For me, my decision was based on something I think is an advantage of deaf culture. The signing deaf don't spend their lives worrying about how they compare to hearing people and feeling sad about being deaf. This was the BIG problem with me when I became deaf. I experienced tremendous sadness. I was depressed for a very long time. The thing that make me feel better was when I met deaf people who seemed to be completely unconcerned with being deaf. A couple used CI but most of them were just your garden variety deaf people. No HA, no CI, signers with family and kids and bills to pay. I watched them closely. They had many interests and social opportunities. They had a great deal of joy about their lives. It made me think, "What's my problem?" I mean, I had earned two college degrees before I became deaf, so I had a lot of good things going for me. Not having to struggle with learning to speak or to learn English. but I was scared and I didn't know how to adjust to being deaf. I decided to use deaf people as an example to me. I joined deaf social groups and I participated in charitable work to raise money for deaf social services. I took many, many classes in ASL and, maybe best of all, I read the history of the deaf and saw people like Laurent Clerc and how intelligent he was and how he was so comfortable with himself. I read about the deaf people of Paris who achieved such greatness; people like Jean Massieu and Ferdinand Berthier. They were very inspiring to me. When I look around me I realized the only people there were doctors and nurses who seemed to want to administer one test after another. I thought, "Well, what do the tests mean? Are they connected to some strategy to improve the quality of my life? I don't think they were. They were just more tests that pointed out to me that I would always be a "case" and not a person to people in the business of making their living by solving one problem of a deaf person but finding another to replace it so they could have a reason to come back to their jobs and make more money. I realized after reading about Clerc that my mental health was the more important issue. Not my hearing. I wanted to get up every day and not be concerned with being deaf but with have a good mental outlook. It just seemed to me that the longer the time I spend around doctors, the more they pointed out my "special needs" and my "problems".
So. What does one do to make a good sense of self-esteem a reality? I decided to see what I could be as a deaf man. I didn't like being called "hearing-impaired". It seemed like the same as calling a woman a "non-man". I don't feel "impaired". My mind works fine. My attitude got an adjustment. I feel like a whole person who doesn't have to rely on someone telling me "what I ought to be" in this world. I didn't want to feel dependent on a doctor or nurse for the rest of my life, submitting my body to operated on and then wondering if tomorrow someone will say, "Oh, you are too early. Something new is coming, but maybe you can't benefit from it now because you were already implanted." That's what both hearing and deaf people say about their computers. Whatever you get today is obsolete tomorrow. I've decided to skip the CI and I feel pretty glad about it. I wish you all the best of luck in your decisions on using the CI. It's an adult decision and I think we all owe it to ourselves to make the decision for our own happiness.
