Saga magazine (a UK magazine for the over-50s) included a piece in their latest edition about me and my cochlear implant. I’ve just realised that the article is available online so here’s a link. I was pleased to get an email from the Cochlear Implant centre a few days after publication, reporting that they had been contacted by a man worried about his wife’s worsening hearing problems and wondering if a CI might be a solution. They were able to point him in the right direction for an assessment.
Thank you Saga, then, and special thanks to Med-El (the manufacturer of my implant) whose publicity department arranged the article.
The clown with the funny face has gone. Or almost so.
I’ve had a perforated eardrum. It was the non-implanted side, after a chest infection/cough….sudden sharp pain…..fluid coming out of my ear…..ring 111…..trip to see emergency doctor on a Saturday morning. It all seems fine now but yes I did panic. I particularly panicked when I couldn’t hear my hearing aid’s reassuring plinkety-plink-plink sound when I turned it on. My GP said it might take a few weeks for the eardrum to heal enough to give me my “normal” hearing back in that ear but, just two weeks after it all began, things sound pretty good. So that’s not the main point of this post. The point is……what do you say to yourself to check that your ears are working??? 
I last talked about music not long after I had attended the session devoted to it at the Cochlear Implant Centre. As you might remember, I’d gone along with an open mind but also knowing that music wasn’t that important to me so I probably wasn’t going to be devoting myself to long hours of listening-to-music practice. What’s happened since?
Curlews first. A couple of weeks ago the guys from Med-El were back with us for another filming session, the last for several months; they are returning later this year for a “one year later” session and then we’re done. Nigel and I were sitting on the settee, talking about how things were going, three months after switch-on, when the subject of curlews came up. I don’t think that particular clip will get into the final version because Nigel said “have you heard curlews yet?” and I said “no, not yet”, which is not very thrilling for a film. But now I have.
The point of the advert is to promote one of the tiny, in-the-ear-canal hearing aids that are totally invisible when worn. They literally fit right down inside your ear, with nothing at all showing in or on the visible bits. Sadly, they are only suitable for people with the milder levels of hearing loss or I’d have put my name down. But the debate about the pros and cons of “invisible” hearing aids crops up quite often in the online deaf/hearing loss community, with a lot of people arguing that “invisible” equates to “something to be ashamed of”. Why should we be ashamed of our hearing loss, they say?
Listening to the radio was nowhere near the top of the list of things I hoped to be able to do post-implant. I’d not been able to make any sense of the radio for years, but I didn’t really miss it much. Some things you just put to one side, and forget.
More than a bit deaf 