Klaas Helsinga

• 77 year-old male
• Progressive hearing loss over 40 years due to hereditary factors and excessive noise exposure
• Implanted at age 74

The following story is one person's experience with a cochlear implant. Your experience may be very different. Success with a cochlear implant is influenced by many factors including how long a person has had hearing loss, the age a person receives an implant, medical and anatomical factors and more. Please consult your cochlear implant professional and/or the Bionic Ear Association with questions.

My loss of hearing started when I was about 30 years of age. Hearing loss is in my family, but because of my service in the marines, I was exposed to a lot of noise. Many times, coming back from combat, my ears were just ringing from all the noise. I was about 32 when I went to see a doctor and he told me that I had the hearing of an 80 year-old man. At that time I started to use two hearing aids. They served their purpose and I was doing OK, but I needed new aids about every 5 years.

By the time I reached the age of 60, my speech understanding was getting very poor. I asked for stronger aids, but I was told that there was nothing better than the ones I had. In other words, I had reached the end of the line. Communication was getting worse and worse. At work I had to communicate with many people every day. Telephone communication was getting so bad that I was afraid to pick up the telephone. If somebody else was near me, I asked him to pick up the telephone and tell me who it was and what they wanted. At age 62 I came to the conclusion that I was not able to do my work any more. It was very frustrating, because after 33 years working at the same place I had reached the top and I had hoped to work to age 65 before retiring. For the next 12 years I struggled on, but things became worse and worse.

I didn't want to go anywhere. I was afraid to go to the bank in case the teller asked me something. I was afraid to go in a store in case a sales lady asked me something. If I had to go someplace I made sure that my wife was with me. I took lessons in lip-reading, but didn't seem to catch on at all. Life became very scary. If a neighbor came walking down the road, I would turn around and go in the house, because I was afraid he would say something to me. It was like living between four walls and not being able to escape.

Communication at home was getting to be non-existent. Arguments were getting more and more frequent, mostly because of misunderstandings. Many times I got tired of asking people to repeat themselves, so I got in the habit of saying yes and sometimes no, hoping that it was the right answer and of course still having no idea what the person was talking about.

A year before I got my implant, our son and daughter-in-law asked us to go with them and our grandchildren for a trip to Europe. My wife wanted to go, but I said you go with them, I'm going to stay home. I just couldn't bring myself to go and be amongst people for three weeks, not being able to communicate. So my wife went and I stayed home, between my four walls.

One day our daughter was talking to a lady from the hearing society and she asked my daughter if it was OK for her to have a talk with us. She explained to us that with a cochlear implant I should be able to hear much better. It was the first time that we got some real information about an implant. On my first visit with the implant team, it was established that I was a candidate for an implant. On my hearing test I had scored 5% speech understanding with both ears and two hearing aids. Many visits followed, because of all the tests that had to be done, but I finally got the word that all was well and a date was set for the operation.

Sure I was afraid of the operation, because it was explained to me that there is always that possibility that something can go wrong. But the possibility to be able to hear again was overwhelming. I knew that I was in the hands of a doctor that had performed many such operations before. As it turned out the operation was not bad at all. I went home the next day and a week later I was working in my garden again.

About a month later, I went to get the external parts of my hearing device. It was the day I had looked forward to for a long time. It took a fair amount of time to get the processor set up for my specific need and I was told that I would have to come back a few more times to readjust the processor. When I ventured out into the noisy world, I just couldn't understand where all the noise was coming from! As I was leaving the hospital and walking through the corridors I could hear my footsteps. As we went through the door and into the street, I looked up because I heard this loud noise, and it turned out to be a bunch of crows on top of the roof talking to each other. My wife Marie wanted to do some shopping while we were in the city, so we drove to this big mall. As I got out of the car I peered up to the sky looking for an airplane because I thought the loud roar I was hearing was from an airplane flying really low just above us. But Marie pointed out that it was actually the traffic noise that I was hearing. While in the store, I lost track of Marie and a sales lady asked me if she could help me and I was so surprised to be able to hear exactly what she said on the first try!

Coming home that night we had to go to a small house party at a neighbor's place. In the past, I would just sit there, not being able to communicate at all. But this time it was different. I am not saying that I could understand everything that was being said, but I was able to talk and understand what the person was saying who was sitting next to me. I couldn't believe it!

In the first month I had many more experiences of hearing sounds that were totally strange to me. I was now hearing so many sounds that I had not heard for years and were totally forgotten. The clock ticking on the wall, the click of the computer mouse, the rain hitting the windows, the birds singing in the garden, and I can go on and on. At first many sounds were annoying me. The fridge was too loud, the dishwasher made too much noise; even the birds were sometimes too loud. But as time went by I got so used to these sounds that I didn't pay attention to them any more.

Our life has gone back to normal. We are even going to Europe in September, visiting family and friends, and this time I'm not afraid to take the trip and be around all the people. My hearing is not perfect and I still have a problem in noisy situations. But compare to where I was, well there just is no comparison. I can talk on the phone again, I go anywhere not needing an escort, at home we can just talk to each other and we don't even have to be in the same room. It has been two-and-a-half years now and as time went by, my speech understanding has improved so greatly. In my last test I was able to repeat 90 sentences out of a hundred, instead of 5 with my hearing aids before I got the cochlear implant.

I sometimes think back to the time before my implant and how it would have been now, if I did not have an implant. Life is so much better this way! And I want to thank the people of Advanced Bionics and the implant team for making this happen.