Real Life Stories

Real Stories. Real Recipients.

Many Choices Await You
Now that you know your child is a good candidate for a cochlear implant, the next leg of his or her journey to a wondrous, thrilling world alive with sound is potentially the most confusing. Many choices await you—some easy, others not so easy. You will need to carefully consider each of these, and then make decisions based on information provided by your child’s audiologist and doctors, as well as information gathered from a host of sources you may wish to seek out on your own.

First, Become Informed
One good source of the vital insights you’ll need to help you make the best choices for your son or daughter is the Bionic Ear Association (BEA). In addition to providing a wealth of facts about cochlear implants, the BEA also is an organization set up to offer emotional support.

“Many of the volunteers at the BEA are parents of children who have received a cochlear implant,” says Cindy Roller of Sparks, Nevada, mother of two-year-old bilateral implant recipient, Carson. “They’ve already been through the entire process and can give you encouragement at every step of this journey. You can call the BEA volunteers at any time of day or night. And if they don’t have the answers, they can put you in touch with other parents or medical specialists who do.”

As soon as possible, you should select the physician whom you want to perform the implant surgery, and decide where and when it will happen. The physicians best trained for this procedure are otolaryngologists, also known as ear-nose-and throat specialists. There are many hospitals best equipped for cochlear implant surgery. Many are affiliated with a university, although more and more non-academic institutions are fast-becoming notable cochlear implant centers, where the procedure can be done.

The scheduling of surgery depends on the surgeon and the operating room’s availability. (You also may not be able to set a date for the surgery until after the funding source—most commonly a health insurance plan—agrees to pay for the implants and procedure.) 

Many parents try to arrange things so that the surgery coincides with their vacations from work to give them as much time as possible to be at home with their recuperating child following the operation. Parents of older children sometimes opt to let their son or daughter decide on the general timing of surgery.

Such was the case for Samantha Brilling of Atlanta, who was six when she received a cochlear implant. Says her mom, Debbie, “I wanted to hold off until the school year ended, but Samantha couldn’t wait that long. She told me she was tired of struggling, of not being able to hear her friends. So she had the surgery as soon as there was an opening on the surgeon’s calendar.”

One Ear Or Both?
Also to be decided is the question of whether to implant in one ear or both—if both, then you will need to settle on whether it should be done all at once or on two different occasions months or  years apart. By and large, parents have no choice but to go with a single-ear implant because most insurance companies are not yet covering the costs of an implant in each ear (though that is slowly changing). Furthermore, in many cases, surgery teams recommend only one implant because two placed at the same time might prove too hard on the child.

On the other hand, there are plenty of parents who insist on—and succeed in getting—implants in both of their child’s ears with the aim of making the hearing experience as close to natural as possible. “If your kid needs glasses to see clearly, you wouldn’t buy him a set of frames with only one lens in it,” contends Carson’s dad Scott in explaining why he and Cindy elected to have their infant implanted with a pair of cochlear implants in a single surgery. “We went with an implant in each ear so Carson could hear in stereo and be better able to tell which direction sound is coming from. We felt not only would that increase his comprehension of sound, but also help him react the right way to sounds that signal danger—for instance, the sound of a car coming at him from behind and off to one side.”

Which Cochlear Implant Is Right For My Child?
Next is the selection of a brand of cochlear implant to use. Your child’s audiologist and doctors will likely present to you the names of cochlear implant companies. They may also offer you a brief description of the differences among those companies with regard to the quality, durability, reliability, performance, and upgrade potential of their cochlear implant devices.

Cindy says that after she was supplied such a list, she went about contacting each of the companies for detailed product and service-support information. She says the company that left her and Scott most impressed was Advanced Bionics. “They were the only one that made a point to keep in touch with us after we first contacted them, and that meant a lot to us,” she says. “It showed they cared. In fact, everything this company did to educate us—to put us in contact with parents who had already gone through what we were going through, everything—it all said to us that this company was on top of things. And that helped give us the confidence to make the choice we did as far as which brand to go with.”

It also quickly became apparent to Cindy and Scott that the products from Advanced Bionics were of exceptionally high quality. “We had an opportunity to look at, hold, and see a demonstration of the company’s devices before we made up our minds, and these just seemed so much better built than any other make we were shown,” says Scott, a musician who knows something about precision engineering and quality construction because of his sideline as a high-end hot-rod designer. “The workmanship alone spoke volumes about Advanced Bionics. It told me this was a company that pulls out all the stops to get everything exactly right.”

The word Debbie Brilling uses to describe the quality of the devices from Advanced Bionics is “amazing.” “Besides Samantha, I have a son, Jonathan, who, like Samantha, was born with hearing loss,” she says. “Jonathan is three years younger than Samantha, but he received his cochlear implant nearly a decade before she did. It was 1996, and he was four years old at the time. When it was time to have Samantha implanted, there was no question that we would choose Advanced Bionics because it had worked so well for Jonathan.”

Meanwhile, Scott and Cindy deemed it a plus that they would be dealing with the only cochlear implant maker based right here in the United States. Says Scott, “It was good to know that an American company is leading the world with cochlear implant technology. This made us feel extra good about going with Advanced Bionics.”

Of concern to most parents with an active kid is whether the external components of the cochlear implant will withstand the daily punishment they know their child will dish out on the device. Indeed, it happens that headpieces, processors, and battery packs end up buried in the sandbox, dropped on pavement, run over by a tricycle, plunged down a toilet, or much worse. Fortunately, as many parents have discovered, Advanced Bionics’ Sound Processor hardware is far from delicate. “Those external pieces are really durable,” says Scott.

Then there is the issue of technological performance. Jim D., an electronics engineer from Rancho Cucamonga, California, had two criteria for evaluating the performance capabilities of the implants he was considering for his three year-old son, Luke. “First, the electronics used by the device had to be the most advanced available,” he says. “Second, I wanted Luke to have the implant that would deliver the best sound resolution. Together, those two aspects would, I was convinced, give Luke the best ability to hear and, by extension, give him the best chance at developing normal speech.” After seeing the various choices available for Luke and having all the features and capabilities demonstrated, Jim chose Advanced Bionics.

For Debbie, a key selling-point of the Advanced Bionics cochlear implant devices was the ability to tailor the performance to the individual user’s requirements. “With the other leading company’s product, they’d implant it, turn it on, and that would be that—the performance of the device would be what it was,” she says. “On the other hand, Advanced Bionics’ technology allowed for a variety of strategies. It could be adjusted to take into account each child’s unique hearing response to the implant.”

Adds Cindy, “It was super-important to us that the implant we chose be one that could be upgraded down the road. We liked that Advanced Bionics let you upgrade just by installing new software in the processor rather than have to go through another surgery to replace the electronics inside [Carson’s] head.”

Relieved And Excited
With all decisions made, it’s natural for parents to experience conflicting emotions. On one level, you feel a sense of relief that the choosing part of the journey is behind. At the same time, though, you may also feel heightened anxiety as the next stage approaches—surgery and activation of the implant. More than likely, though, you’ll probably feel joyous, as Cindy and Scott did. “Just thinking that our child would soon be entering the world of listening was incredibly exciting,” says Cindy, smiling as she wipes away a tear. “We knew inside that everything was going to turn out the way we wanted.”

The opinions and experiences expressed in these stories solely reflect those of the recipients interviewed. Results and experiences with the Advanced Bionics HiResolution Bionic Ear System will vary.

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