Cochlear Implant 14...Patience!

It's less than two weeks now till activation (turn-on) for this CI. I am beyond excited, but also chary about the whole thing. What if it doesn't work? If so, I won't be the first person to experience a grand failure. Having a cochlear implant is not the same as hearing. It's simply and profoundly the new manifestation of my deafness. Because whatever happens, it won't be the same as hearing as I remember it--sharp, clear, effortless. It'll be more work as I learn to identify what I'm hearing.

What has it meant to be deaf all these years? In my case, because I communicate with nonsigning hearing people largely through lip reading, it has meant I spend a lot of time on the edge of conversations waiting to see (hear) the ONE WORD that will make all the other words make sense. It has meant I've spent a lot of time in noisy restaurants almost bored but not fidgeting, smiling and laughing at jokes I haven't really heard. (All those Holy Thursday High Masses in Latin, which we school children had to sit through quietly without understanding a thing we were hearing, was great training for being deaf.) It has meant that as things have fallen out of my experience--crickets, the ineffable sound of the cottonwood tree (called the "singing tree" by the Native Americans) that I loved so much, the incredible variations of the mocking bird--I've had to let them go, and I've probably forgotten many, many sounds even exist. One woman was startled by the sound of frogs croaking in a marshy pond near the audiologist's office when she left the building on activation day!

Family, friends, neighbors are very anxious for my implant to succeed. They want me to be able to hear again the minute the audiologist turns it on. Mary Lou's promise, "I'm going to call you on April 3 and see if you can hear me," is typical. But what if I can't? What if the sound produced by the implant in conjunction with the processor is so strange I can't figure it out at first? This happens to many people. Some CI recipients have described people's voices--even their own--as "hollow, toneless." One woman said her little dog barking sounded like "a cow mooing in a barrel." Bev Biderman's book Wired for Sound details the long process she went through to make sense of what she was hearing. Among other things, she listened to a tape of Make Way for Ducklings while reading the children's storybook at the same time. Biderman is my hero in that she simply refused to give up. She knew what she wanted from this implant--to understand speech, to listen to music--and she went after it.

What if I can understand almost everything right away? What if I can hear speech but not music, or vice versa? [Ha...I'll never forget the looks I got back in the early 1960s when I asked, "What song is that playing on the radio?" "Um...Jingle Bells."]

Among other things, I want to OVERHEAR. I want to get on the bus in the morning and OVERHEAR what people are saying into their cellphones. [I know, I know....] I want to hear the rhythm of everyday speech of all kinds of people: the DC taxi drivers from all over the world, my neighbors--from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Sweden, and Virginia--our secretary from Nigeria. And my best friend, who was born and raised in Baltimore and, save for two years in France and one year in Arizona, has never lived more than 25 miles away from her birthplace. And my children and grandchildren...what do they sound like now?

The world of sound I'll reenter is far different from the one I left in 1963. I can't quite believe I had the nerve to go through with this. As the ineffable Martha says when talking about our class reunion, "It'll be interesting...and possibly even enjoyable." More than that, surely!