Cochlear Implants are only for people who never had hearing

i was born hearing....lost my hearing through menengitis at age of 4....i have a CI now.
I have 2 jobs, one of them is a home depot associate where i communicate verbally with customers non-stop constantly.

the CI works great for me.

ive also got friends who were born deaf and they have the CI and if they wanted, they could have the same job i have because they can communicate well with the CI too.

doesnt matter if your born deaf or not, it matters if you live your commitment to go to therapy and practice every day for most of the rest of your life.
 
Cjanik said:
doesnt matter if your born deaf or not, it matters if you live your commitment to go to therapy and practice every day for most of the rest of your life.
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True, that's what my friends said this to me. You go to therapy to practise everyday only if you REALLY want it. That's why I decide CI is not for me. :)
 
doesnt matter if your born deaf or not, it matters if you live your commitment to go to therapy and practice every day for most of the rest of your life.
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I'd have to disagree........the research indicates that the best users of CIs are those who once had hearing at one time, even if it was as a very young infant. The gross majority of deaf kids lost their hearing. Only a small percentage of them are born deaf. I'm not saying that someone born deaf can NEVER hear or talk.....just that it will be a LOT more difficult for them to do so.....and many of the congentially deaf kids who are sucesses either didn't have apraxia (which is WICKED common in dhh kids) or grew up in families that thrived on the therapy as lifestyle crap! (aka stupid yuppies who are the type who buy their kids toys that increase their SAT scores)
 
ravensteve1961 said:
Then How did it get passed if there more republicans than democrats in both houses? Remember republicans are the majority now and they make the rules and pass the laws. Why you think ethics rules are changed now?
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It didn't. Embryonic stem cell research is still NOT being federally funded. He and other pro-life Republicans approve of ADULT stem cell research. There is your difference.
 
Crazymanw00t said:
I wish to make a law to ban the CI to give the CI to the born deaf people. They don't need CI and the CI isn't for them. THE CI IS FOR THE PEOPLE THAT LOST THEIR HEARING AT THEIR LIFETIME. It just makes sense really.

CI is like the Hilter to the deaf world.
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I don't agree with this. CI can be for anyone. My son will be getting one in October, and I think that we made the right decison for him. He'll be 2 years old in November. I think that getting the CI now will benefit him, and when he gets older he can decide weather he wants to use his CI or not, but it will then be up to him.
 
Hello, Ellie-
Ellie said:
I don't agree with this. CI can be for anyone. My son will be getting one in October, and I think that we made the right decison for him. He'll be 2 years old in November. I think that getting the CI now will benefit him, and when he gets older he can decide weather he wants to use his CI or not, but it will then be up to him.
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I'm sure you did not arrive at this decision lightly and I will respect that. Hindsight is indeed 20/20 and I sincerely hope that years down the road will only help validate the implantation decision for the better.

That said, I trust that you and your significant other will proactively provide a rich language atmosphere for your son in developing his language base. Parental involvement has been truly a key predictor of a Deaf child's success in acquiring solid English language skills he/she will need for the rest of his/her life.

And hopefully, when the time is right, your son will want to learn ASL, all on his own initiative. And that you will not overtly or subtly discourage such efforts. At any rate, here's to a successful upbringing for your son, and that he will easily realize his dreams in life.
 
I'm not so sure either way. We had our daughter implanted at age two, thinking that she could choose to use it or not when she was old enough, but she has chosen not to use it at age four, so now we are at an impasse, do we force her to stick with therapy so that she can realize the maximum possible benefit, since she is already implanted, or do we stick with our promise to ourselves that we would never force her to use it. It's a sucky-suck situation.
 
well. I decided to get hearing aids again after 4 years and I am profoundly deaf. i don't mind going to therapy because I really want to speak better verbally and I will not always be with deaf people ALL the time, but I want to have hearing people understand what I am trying to say.
 
Hi everyone!

I've been away from the boards for awhile, but wanted to comment on ravensteve's question. Hope all of you are doing well! :)

Ravensteve, I've had my CI activated for just about 9 months. 95% of what I hear sounds exactly like or very close to what I remember with hearing aids. )For example, a car's turn signal, microwave beeping, birds singing, door knock, etc. The voices of family and friends also sound like I remember from many years ago.

Sounds and voices may not sound like you remember during the first few months following activation, but they become "normalized" over time (if you had any degree of useful hearing before your CI).

I started losing my hearing at age 3 (mild hearing loss). I've had severe-profound hearing loss for the past 10 years. However, I was able to hear speech with a powerful FM system until 2-3 years when I lost what speech discrimination I had in my right ear. (My left ear has had no discrimination for the past 10 years.)

Although this is not the case with everyone, generally people who lose their hearing later in life tend to perform better with their CIs than those who are prelingually deaf. Since the prelingually deaf do not have any auditory memory from which to compare and associate meaning to sound, it's more difficult (although not impossible) for them to understand what is heard through a CI.

It's impossible for surgeons and audis (or anyone) to know what is heard through an implant. All they can do is speculate about what they think a person may hear based on what kind of feedback they receive from CI users. In addition, each person's CI experience is different. While one person may report hearing "normalized" sounds, another may only hear indecipherable blips, beeps and clicks. There is so much more that goes into determining what is heard with a CI than speculation alone. :)
 
Hear Again, actually what about the research that indicates that those who LOST their hearing, even prelingally, are better users of CI then those who were very early deafened (meaning before six months) or born deaf?
I really do think that maybe infant memory could play a part in "prelingal" sucesses......BTW welcome back.....we been missing ya! Post MORE!
 
welcome back Hear again.. saddly ravensteve is been banned so he's not allowed to view this board anymore. (am i right?)
 
I just want to say - I'm postlingually deaf (had meningitis when I was 9) and was implanted with a CI 23 years later and its been *amazing*. I can converse with almost anyone. I'm able to follow conversations with people who aren't even in the same room as me, I listen to music, I use the phone, and do so many things I never could for more than two decades. I never had to "go to therapy," and every week brings new sounds and new experiences, and the clarity and understanding I have just keeps improving.

So I guess I'm a contradiction to the belief that CI's are only for people who have never heard before. What I hear is clear, concise, not "robotic" in the least.

Last week I was outside on my parent's back patio talking to them, and I could hear the robins and the chickadees, and it was just *amazing* to hear them!!!
 
but she has chosen not to use it at age four, so now we are at an impasse, do we force her to stick with therapy so that she can realize the maximum possible benefit, since she is already implanted, or do we stick with our promise to ourselves that we would never force her to use it.
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How about a compromise? Don't theraputize her life.....but maybe have her go see a "fun" speech/listening therapist every so often so she can keep in practice. If she really really hates it.....then stop the therapy and you can move on.
 
Hey everybody, I dont mean to interrupt the thread but I also didnt want to annoy anyone by starting another thread on this topic.

This post is very important to me and my mom so any info I could get would be greatly appreciated by the two of us.

My mom is profoundly deaf right now. Without her BTE hearing aids she hears nothing. With the aids in she can hear you if you speak loud and allow her to read your lips. My mom was born with perfectly normal hearing. She gradually lost it starting in her 30's (she is now in her 50's). Hearing loss runs in the female side of my moms family.

Anyhow, my mom has been thinking about getting a CI for years now. She went to go see a doctor a few years ago and after viewing her audiogram the doc said my mom would be approved for a CI without any problem and he instructed her to go for her blood work to get prepared.

The thing is my mom has put off a CI for years now because she is very scared. She does not know what to expect from the surgery. She does not know how much the CI wil help her, if the sounds she hears will be machine like and then if she is not satisfied there is no turning back.

Right now my mom has very good speech for a person with profound hearing loss. People are surprised when she tells them how bad her hearing is because she speaks so well. The only words she struggles with are new words she has come across since she lost her hearing. Being that speaks quite well already, I think therapy will be much easier on her (correct me if i am wrong)

I know the success of CI's vary for each person, but is there atleast a minimum percentage of how much your hearing improves after a CI? Will my mom atleast be able to speak on the phone again, and have a normal face to face conversation with somebody else?

Thanks for your time.
 
Apparently the surgery is pretty straightforward these days. It's done mostly as day surgery (you go back home the same day) and it takes 2 hours. It is surgery on the cochlear and doesn't touch the brain.

It sounds like your mum does need a lot of support to get through this but she sounds like a really good candidate for CI to me because she has auditory memory from her days with normal hearing. Plus she has good speech - this will help her with learning speech discrimination with the CI. However the sooner she can get it done the better because this memory slowly fades over time.

I think your mum basically needs a lot of handholding to get through this and a good CI centre will provide this for her. From what my research tells me the first few weeks are hard because it's a different medium of sound and the brain has to relearn again but that late deafened people are the group that see the best results over the long term.
 
Crazymanw00t said:
CI is like the Hilter to the deaf world.
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I am really sorry that people see it this way. Deafness cannot simply be defined as a "disability" becase it is a disability that happens to effect the faculties that are most significant for human beings to develop unique culture: hearing and speech ie. language. So deafness becomes a "culture" also. I would never tell a blind person they shouldn't be able to have therapies which improve their eyesight, and I wouldn't tell a person with a spinal injury they shouldn't have therapies which imppove their chances of walking again. But then again, I would never tell a black or hispanic person they should "become white" just to get along better in the world. So at what point do we say the disability is more important than the culture? Being rid of a disability is good, but being rid of a culture is not good. So what if a CI user stays true to their defa roots? Keeps deaf friends? Uses ASL with them? Promotes understanding and acknowledgement of deaf people and deaf culture? Is that good enough? I don't have the answers - I just pose this as food for thought.
 
MorriganTait said:
So at what point do we say the disability is more important than the culture? Being rid of a disability is good, but being rid of a culture is not good.
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A lot of us with disabilities feel much like deaf do - it is part of our identity, and there is a culture around it. Not to the same extent as deafness, but it is there. The "if you could take a pill and wake up without [disability], would you?" question is quite common, and tends to follow some of the same lines as it does in the deaf community. So it's not necessarily true that being rid of a disability is good, either.

That said (and this is just IMHO), I don't think getting a cochlear necessarily makes you non-deaf.
 
I'm trying to stay out of debate but I'm not doing a very good job!! But I just wanted to make the point that immunisation is having a big impact on the number of deaf people being born.

I have a friend who teaches deaf children in a sign language (Auslan) environment and he said recently that his classes were getting smaller and smaller every year and that they were having to accept children with multiple disabilities (who are increasing due to better survival rates at birth) and lay off one of the teachers to sustain the unit.

I asked him why the number of deaf children was falling and he said "immunisation" - it has significantly reduced the number of children being born deaf via rubella. He didn't mention CIs although I know from previous conversations that he doesn't think much of them.

Also in the UK where I grew up I remember reading an article that said that the "deaf club" scene there was dwindling because younger deaf people even if they used sign as their primary language were becoming more involved with hearing friends. The article mentioned that the ability to send text messages on phones has had an impact on their social life too.

So it looks like there is a number of social factors at work here - not just one.
 
R2D2 said:
Apparently the surgery is pretty straightforward these days. It's done mostly as day surgery (you go back home the same day) and it takes 2 hours. It is surgery on the cochlear and doesn't touch the brain.

It sounds like your mum does need a lot of support to get through this but she sounds like a really good candidate for CI to me because she has auditory memory from her days with normal hearing. Plus she has good speech - this will help her with learning speech discrimination with the CI. However the sooner she can get it done the better because this memory slowly fades over time.

I think your mum basically needs a lot of handholding to get through this and a good CI centre will provide this for her. From what my research tells me the first few weeks are hard because it's a different medium of sound and the brain has to relearn again but that late deafened people are the group that see the best results over the long term.
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Thanks, is there an estimate to how much my mom's hearing will improve? Will she be able to hold a normal conversation with somebody or speak on the phone? Possibly hold a job that requires verbal interaction with customers?

Also, people's voices will not sound unverisally robotic permanently? Speech becomes more normal over time, correct?

Thanks so much for your help. This means a lot to me and my mom.
 
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