Dave Spencer

• Age 52
• Long term progressive hearing loss since teen years
• Received cochlear implant in 1999

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.

Hi, my name is Dave, and I have a severe to profound hearing loss in both ears. In the fall of 1999, I attended a communication strategy course at a local university here in Canada. It was through this course that I inquired about the cochlear implant.

My hearing loss became noticeable in my early teens. This made school particularly challenging as I often had trouble hearing what was being taught. Through a lot of extra work and help from my teachers, however, I was able to graduate from high school and move on to the working world. My first job was with a family with a deaf mother. Due to this they understood my problem and I did very well with them. It was not until I got into the mainstream of the working world that I really felt my hearing was a disability. At work, I was often ignored and overlooked by others.

In 1986, I was injured on the job and the full effect of my hearing loss became apparent to me as I was unable to do the heavily-physical work in which I was experienced. Up until then, I really didn't believe that such an invisible handicap could be so disrupting to a person's life. Job interviews were especially frustrating as when I told the interviewer about my hearing loss, it seemed I was automatically dismissed as a potential employee. Eventually I was hired by the provincial government under a work program for people with disabilities. A few months after the program ended, I was hired for one of the jobs in which I had assisted during the program. Over a period of twenty years, my hearing problem had progressed to a profound loss which made working in a hearing world very challenging. I was unable to use the phone which is necessary in most jobs. At home, I felt lost in a group of friends as I could not follow the conversation if more than one person was talking at once. My wife was very understanding and would stop and let me know what was being said but it was not the same.

I will always remember with fondness the audiologist that I worked with. She prepared me well for the operation, and I was at ease going into the operation. I felt I had nothing to lose and the whole world to gain. I looked forward to my day of activation. For me, it would be the beginning of a new experience and maybe the beginning of a new world of sound. The first two days after activation were very difficult for both my wife and I as we were both thinking that the implant had not accomplished very much. I seemed to be hearing environmental sounds but the voices I wished to hear were just not coming through.

It took a long distance phone call for me to realize that I was in fact hearing voices but was not recognizing them for what they were. I rapidly adjusted to the implant from that moment on. At the age of forty six, I was hearing sounds that I had never heard in my life. Being the curious person that I am, I had to know where each sound was coming from and what was making such a sound. I am sure I earned some weird looks from strangers when I asked my wife, "What's that sound?" at any new sound that I was picking up. I was like a small child first learning to listen. The new sounds often brought tears of joy to my eyes. For example, I became tearful when, during my first meal after the activation, I realized that I could hear the crunch of the french fries that I was eating. After realization that I could hear the chirping of birds, my thoughts returned to my daughters at home, and I was overcome with emotion as both of my daughters are losing their hearing and I realized I was now hearing much better than they were.

Shortly after activation, I longed to hear my best friend's voice and wondered if it would sound as it did when I was in my early twenties. It sounded just the same as I remembered. Although some sounds were like I had remembered from years back, my wife's voice sounded so much different that I had to try to forget the voice I had heard with hearing aids and replace it with the new voice. I give my wife a lot of credit for helping me so much with all the exercises the audiologist gave me for practice. At first, I was exhausted. We practiced for about a month or so with different verbal exercises. I then progressed to listening to books on tape and then to recordings on the phone. It finally got to the point that the exercises were no longer needed as I was hearing full sentences without using lipreading and almost everything that was going on around me.

I have progressed from hearing only two percent with the hearing aids to scoring 90-100% on sentences given me in testing with the implant. I have become more active in different organizations in which I was unable to take part when using hearing aids. I changed jobs within three months after the activation and now use the phone regularly in my work. I have taken courses which would have been almost impossible to complete with hearing aids.

My spiritual life has changed dramatically. I now read in church, attend church conferences, and serve on Parish Council. I have taken part in a video for our local hearing and speech clinic, been interviewed on radio, been on television newscasts, and given talks to many different groups about the ways that the implant has changed my life. There are so many different things that I hear now that I had never heard before. It means so much to me to be able to fully participate in whatever I want to do. The sound of music fills me with much happiness. To hear my name called from another room means so much to me. My implant has given me a new life. I feel like someone who has been taken from the darkness of the world of profound deafness and returned to the hearing world of light.