cochlear implants
- Thread starter Hypoxia
- Start date
CountryGuy2
Really Experienced
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2013
- Posts
- 159
I worked with a guy who got those. It was life changing.
Our middle grandson has bilateral implants. He received these when he was 13 months old. He was born with the ability to hear anything above a blender, 90 dB.
What an amazing device. After some speech therapy and schooling, he now has a life of regular hearing and speaking, playing sports, roughhousing with his brothers and acting like any other 7 YO. You can different "skins" over them like favorite sports team etc.
Cons are few. The receivers are attached with a magnet and if he gets bumped hard, they come unstuck. No big deal, her just puts them back on the magnet. To help keep these attached during sports, he wears a headband. Also, when these are first put on in the morning, they tend to be very loud to him. So he gradually enters the real world a little bit at a time. A few extra minutes in his room to get used to them and all is back to normal. They need to be upgraded somehow, whether software or hardware, every few years.
A humorous upside is: if things get too loud, or annoying, he can just take them off!
Hope this helps.
Last edited:
pplwatching
Full grown man
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2003
- Posts
- 2,345
In my experience, part of the answer to your question depends on the individual's circumstances. When I first went deaf (in one ear) I spoke to my specialist doc about implants. He felt that implants are great for kids and even older people with debilitating hearing impairments, but for a partial hearing-able person such as myself, implants would basically be nothing but unintelligible noise requiring a long and steep learning curve to begin to understand.
Kids can learn easily, especially when they don't have a 'normal' frame of reference. I am only deaf on one side. Between having been able to hear for most of my life and a mix of 'normal' and cochlear stimulus, adjusting would be almost impossible.
It's been a couple of years since he and I spoke about it, so technology may have progressed, but in general it seems the younger a person is the more likely they will have a successful outcome with implants.
Kids can learn easily, especially when they don't have a 'normal' frame of reference. I am only deaf on one side. Between having been able to hear for most of my life and a mix of 'normal' and cochlear stimulus, adjusting would be almost impossible.
It's been a couple of years since he and I spoke about it, so technology may have progressed, but in general it seems the younger a person is the more likely they will have a successful outcome with implants.
