Hi, my name is Tina and I’m a 48-year-old woman living in the eastern United States. I am creating this blog about two months before I’m scheduled for a cochlear implant in my left ear. This will be a chronicle of my experiences with it.

Background

I first realized I had hearing loss during a cruise in late 2001, when I was almost 31 years old. I woke up in the middle of the night to something creaking in the cabin as the boat rocked. I rolled over onto my right side and realized I could no longer hear the creaking. I rubbed my fingers together next to each ear, and I could hear it in my right ear but not in the left.

When I got back home, I got an appointment with an ENT as quickly as I could, which turned out to be a couple weeks later. After an exam and a hearing test that showed a significant drop in my left ear, the doctor prescribed steroids and sent me for an MRI. The steroids didn’t help and the MRI showed nothing abnormal, so the ENT basically shrugged and said, “I have no idea why this happened.”

For the next seven years or so, I just lived with it. My right ear was fine, my husband got used to walking on that side of me, and I was an introvert who didn’t have much of a social life and worked in a relatively quiet office, so I could get by reasonably well.

In 2008, I decided to visit an audiologist to see about a hearing aid for the bad ear. Unfortunately, the one I went to was unscrupulous. He set me up with a conventional hearing aid; when I first tried it on, sounds were amplified but I still had virtually no speech recognition in that ear — it sounded like people were speaking through a pillow. The audiologist basically said, “Sorry, hearing aids are not perfect, and this one is not returnable.”

I didn’t learn until much later that they’re supposed to let you try it for a month, and if it doesn’t work for you during that time they’re supposed to take it back for a full refund. Lesson learned.

I did wear that first hearing aid for a while, but eventually I stopped bothering because all it did was make sounds I didn’t care about louder while doing nothing to help with sounds I did, like speech.

In 2013, I decided to make another effort to figure out what was up with my hearing. I went to a different ENT, who sent me to yet another specialist in problems with the ear. That doctor ordered all kinds of tests, including another MRI, but again found no obvious cause for my hearing loss.

Some months later, I came down with a cold. As often happens with colds, my ears felt full; more worryingly, higher pitches, like women’s voices, sounded robotic in my good ear, and it didn’t return to normal when the cold went away. Another round of steroids didn’t seem to make any difference while I was on them, but the day after I fully tapered off, the robotic quality went away and things sounded normal again. Still, a hearing test done around then showed a slight drop in the higher pitches in my good ear. I asked the doctor if there was any way to predict whether this would keep happening, but since he didn’t know the cause, he couldn’t give me an answer.

I saw a new audiologist around this time and got a pair of Phonak BiCROS hearing aids. CROS hearing aids are designed for single-side hearing loss. They work by basically transmitting the sound from your bad side to the good side; BiCROS means that the good side has amplification as well as being a receiver. They were an improvement over the conventional hearing aid, but I still had problems in noisy settings, which were becoming more common for me as my husband and I met a new group of friends and started socializing a lot more than we used to. In late 2017, I switched to a pair of Starkey BiCROS hearing aids.

In the last couple of years, I’ve had increasing difficulty, especially in noisy situations. I can no longer understand TV or movies without captions turned on. Live theater is difficult as well; luckily the biggest venue in the area offers both assistive listening devices and captioned performances, and there’s a group that organizes open-captioned movie screenings at various local theaters. I can generally hear people speaking; it’s understanding the words that’s a problem. My friends are used to having to repeat things for me, and my husband often has to act as interpreter, repeating things other people say for me. I have never learned ASL.

Which brings me to the present. During a routine visit with my audiologist in late 2018, she suggested that I might be a good candidate for a cochlear implant in my bad ear. I went to the ENT and they did a lot of tests that mostly involved speech recognition. With a conventional hearing aid in the bad ear, they played me recordings of people talking with various levels of background noise. I couldn’t understand a single word. My good ear was mostly okay, though not perfect.

The ENT’s conclusion agreed with my audiologist: that I could benefit from a CI in my left ear. However, they cautioned me not to get my hopes up too much: typically cochlear implants are only done for people who have severe hearing loss on both sides, so they didn’t think my health insurance would authorize coverage. I put it out of my mind as best I could while I waited to hear back.

Last Monday (early May 2019), I got a call from the ENT’s office: my insurance had approved it. I have a scheduled surgery date in mid-July 2019. I still have to make a preliminary appointment with the audiologist to talk about what brand I will get.

In this blog, I will document my experiences as I go through the implantation and rehabilitation process for my single-side cochlear implant. Probably there won’t be many posts here until after the surgery.