“Don’t Hear the Reaper” or “Have a Cochlear and a Smile”

This is one of the many blog entries which I’ve begun in the past few months, and have never found the time to finish.  Baby steps…

In April of this year, my father willfully and deliberately allowed a doctor to slice open his head and destroy his hearing.

Intrigued?  It’s true, and personally, I think the full story lives up to the teaser. Read on…

At (or around, it’s not certain) the age of 10, my dad had a horrible bout of the mumps. There was a point where they weren’t sure he’d survive. Obviously, he did, but it left him completely deaf in his left ear, and with reduced hearing in his right. It was really never a big deal. Occasionally, as kids, my sister and I could get away with a little something we shouldn’t because he was facing the wrong direction and couldn’t hear something. But what he lacked in hearing he made up for with peripheral vision that bordered on the superhuman. So it was never really a big deal, and people outside the family really wouldn’t know he had any hearing issues unless he told them. He bought a hearing aid about 20 years ago, when he began to notice a little bit of loss in his right ear, but decided the boost in hearing wasn’t worth the effort.

However, over the past two or three years, the hearing in his right ear has begun to degrade, faster and more noticeably. He started going through more and more hearing aids, each more powerful than the last, but with very little result. By Christmas of last year, he had lost around 80% of the hearing in his right ear, and while he could understand you fine if you were speaking directly towards his right ear and spoke clearly, it became very apparent that he was completely missing out on group discussions, (such as at holidays) and was just nodding his head every now and then to feign comprehension or agreement, or smiling when the group laughed at a joke.

What do you do when you go through six different hearing aids and none seems to make things any better? His doctor offered a suggestion–a cochlear implant. Although a radical solution, a cochlear implant isn’t new or untested. And by God, is it amazing. The surgeon plants a receiver inside your head. Leading from this receiver are several fiber-optic wires, which are literally wrapped around the auditory–or cochlear–nerve (the nerve leading from the ear to the brain). The receiver sends electrical impulses through this nerve, to your brain, just like your ear normally does.

Now, if this receiver is inside your head, how the hell can you hear anything? There’s another piece to this whole contraption, which is external. There’s a sound processor, which looks a lot like a hearing aid. The sound processor sits over your ear, and actually does the hearing for you. This processor takes in sounds, and sends them through a wire to a transmitter. The transmitter sits on the outside of your head, and with the help of a magnet, sits right up against the receiver inside your head and passes the signal to it. It’s really, truly amazing technology. In the weeks between Dad’s decision to go ahead with the implant and the actual surgery, I did a lot of reading about it. I learned that the sound you hear isn’t exactly the same as your natural hearing. It’s a very electronic sound. It reminds me a lot of the Cylon centurions from the original “Battlestar Galactica” back in the day. PBS did a documentary on cochlear implants, hosted by Alan Alda, and on their web site, they have examples of what it sounds like to hear with one. Have a look (or rather, a listen):

http://www.pbs.org/saf/1205/features/Interactive/intro1.htm

We were told that the electronic quality of the sound is a limitation of the software, not the hardware. The hardware is already advanced enough to replicate sounds perfectly, but the software just can’t handle all the inputs at this point in time. The nice thing is that as the software improves, the patient can go to the doctor and get an upgrade to improve the hearing experience. We learned this first-hand once my Dad’s incision was done healing and he went in to try out the hearing device for the first time. When they first fired up the device, everything sounded like church bells to him. That was fixed with some very simple software tweaks.  Over the next several weeks, my parents made several trips to the audio therapist to have the software additional refinements. In June, at Benjamin’s graduation party, (which was outside) my Dad was visibly bothered by the noise of the wind blowing in the background. One more tweak at the doc’s office, and that problem was resolved.

We’re told things are actually much easier for someone like my father, who has 70 years of actual hearing under his belt. He can easily distinguish between the sound of a fan and the sound of water running in the sink. (think about it–they’re really very similar sounds, but we’ve learned to tell the difference) Children who are born deaf and receive cochlear implants don’t have that experience to draw from, so learning to interpret all these sounds (especially the difference between “foreground” and “background” noise)  is much more difficult, and takes pretty intensive training.

I’ve also read that, at this point in time, listening to music with a cochlear implant is a waste of time. Music is WAY too complex for the software to handle now. Talking on the phone is also supposed to be very difficult, but can be mastered with lots of practice. (which my Dad is failing to do)

So really, truly astonishing this is. But at the time Dad was considering this, I had to ask…can you really give up what’s left of your natural hearing for this? What if the procedure doesn’t work? What if the implant doesn’t work as well as advertised? What if…? What if…? What if…?

Of course, the decision was my father’s to make, not mine. But I couldn’t help but put myself in his shoes and hypothesize. What would I do? It really brought out a lot of feelings of fragility and mortality in me. Was I being overdramatic? Well, given that this is a pretty common procedure, and has an extremely high success rate, maybe. But I think we all tend to take a look at our own mortality when we see our parents grow old. As I peered into the looking glass, I really felt like my answer would be, “No, I’ll play the hand I was dealt.” Of course, it wasn’t me who was going through the frustration of sitting in a room full of people and not being able to understand a word. And it wasn’t me with a baby granddaughter who was just beginning to talk. So I decided I really needed to walk a mile in his shoes before I could make the decision he had to make.

It was, in the end, the first words of a child which led my Dad to his decision. He couldn’t bear the thought of being unable to hear his grandkids say “I love you”. Besides, although his father died very young, (of kidney failure) his mother’s side of the family has lots of longevity. My grandmother lived to not-quite-95, and the last of her siblings died at 108. At 70, my Dad realized he possibly has 20 more years, and that was simply too long.  Too many words to miss out on.

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