Pieces of Me

Note: This was written on September 13, 2014 What a long day! It was great to attend Deaf Awareness Week Kickoff! There were new organizations this year that I did not see last year. For those who missed out, this week long awareness isn't just about the deaf, it is also about those who are hard of hearing as well. There is an organization who does home visits to teach one-on-one ASL and I will be checking that out to learn more about t heir services. I know many have there reasons for not learning ASL, and that's fine. However, in the event where there is an emergency and one goes without their hearing aid and/or cochlear implant, in worst case scenario, there is no pen and paper nearby, what would one do to make communication effective? Without the technology, depending on where your hearing falls on the audiogram, if you are in the sever to profound hearing range, you are technically deaf. I know in the sever to profound range, people will pretty m...

I have been wearing my Cochlear Implant for almost two years.  I will say I hear more in general.  If you want to get down to the specifics, well that is still a learning process for me.  I have worn hearing aids from the age of four.  I didn't get my first cochlear implant until the age of twenty-eight.  So, with twenty-four years of wearing hearing aids bilaterally to going bimodal (one hearing aid/one CI), that is twenty-four years of decreasing ability to hear well. That is also twenty-four years of missing out on sounds that most people are used to hearing and probably take it for grant.  So, think about it, while the sound does not sound normal at first with the CI, the brain still has to process all the sounds you are hearing either for the first time ever or the first time in a long time. The brain has long been a mystery in medical sciences; how it works, how it functions and what it is capable of doing at different stages in life.  With a c...