A big aid to hearing
After years of hearing loss, cochlear implant allows Elmira woman to re-experience the sounds of her world
WHEN CHRISTA ALLISON WAS a teenager, her hearing started to fail. Doctors couldn’t explain it, but the hair cells in her inner ear stopped functioning properly, causing significant hearing loss.
“Hearing loss is associated with age, but what happened in my case is that basically you have little hairs in your ears, this is the way it was explained to me, it’s called sensorial, and so you have these little hairs in your ears that allow you to have sound, and mine just started falling over, for whatever reason,” Allison, a lifelong resident of Elmira, explained. “So the hairs just fell over, over time and I went deaf.”
In her early 20s she started wearing hearing aids in both ears, and they made a big difference in her life for over a decade.
But by her early 30s, the aids were no longer working.
“The biggest sort of misconception with people who are hearing impaired, is that people say ‘turn your hearing aid up, turn them up, turn them up,’” Allison explained, noting that not all hearing impairments relate simply to the volume of sound. “You could turn them up as loud as a jet engine and I still wasn’t going to understand what they were saying.”
By the time Allison got a referral to an ear, nose and throat specialist at London University Hospital, she was down to just four per cent hearing, even with her hearing aids. She had spent years moving up the ladder to bigger and bigger aids, but it was clear to her and her husband Chris that they needed to look at other options.
Fortunately, through LUH’s cochlear implant program, Allison was able to undergo a series of tests and interviews that led to her placement on a waiting list for a cochlear implant.
In July of this year, her name was up, and she
underwent the procedure with world renowned surgeon Dr. Lorne Parnes.
And while adjusting to the cochlear implant over the last six weeks has been a gradual process, Allison says she is so happy and grateful to have undergone the surgery.
“It’s 100 per cent better,” she said. “When they first turn it on, it’s just beeps and whistles, but your brain turns the sound into speech, if that makes sense. Everyone sounds almost demonic. There’s no way to judge emotion. Music sounds awful. I’m hoping that maybe that will change, because the sound does get better over time.”
According to the American Institute on Deafness, cochlear implants “bypass damaged portions of the ear and directly stimulate the auditory nerve. Signals generated by the implant are sent by way of the auditory nerve to the brain, which recognizes the signals as sound. Hearing through a cochlear implant is different from normal hearing and takes time to learn or relearn.”
It takes roughly three to six months after the surgery to adjust, Allison said, and she’s had to really work at it.
“I had homework,” she says, smiling. “Chris would cover his mouth and say words and I had to figure out if they were two consonants, or one.”
Chris Allison added, “at first you were actually supposed to figure out if they were the same words, so they could have been like turkey and time, and you were supposed to just say if they were the same or different, but they said if you feel you can, you can say what the words were. So right off the bat you were already saying what the words were, whereas before (the implant), if I would have covered my mouth and was talking, you would never have heard what I was saying. So I noticed right off the bat that it was better.”
For years, Christa depended on lip and speech reading, as well as help from Chris. Now that she has the implant, she feels a new level of independence.
Social and outgoing by nature, the implant is already making a massive difference in her everyday life.
From little things like hearing sounds she hadn’t heard in years – from birds chirping, to the rustling of change in her pocket – to feeling so much more engaged in social situations.
“In life, you can be sad and mope about things, but that’s not going to make it any better. So you’ve just got to do the best with what you’ve got,” Christa said, still smiling.