Although I do not have your degree of hearing loss (my loss was 115 dbs across most fequencies before the operation); I was able to make good use of my residential hearing but then I began to have problems with recruitment in my late teens and early twenties which made it very hard to wear my hearing aid. I had to force myself to wear it in the months before my operation as I had not worn it in a year and half. The only time I wore that hearing aid was when I had to see family.
If you got a CI and it didn't work? That's a risk you'd have to take. What are the odds of a cochlear implantation failure? Various sources say 3 to 5 percent. I was at a high risk for failure due to diabetes because if my cochlear or my cuts were infected and my diabetes were out of control, I'd be risking rejection and the healing would have taken much longer than it normally does.
However the benefits of my CI were greater than the risk of failure. At the very least, it would make it a lot easier to hear things and I wouldn't have to strain so hard to understand people.
Today I had to get my car towed to the Ford center; I have not seen the Ford people since my CI operation. I find that as long as I am not in the section where they drive in cars, it is easy to understand the Ford people and I didn't have to ask twice for the most part. In the past it was a struggle to understand them. It's really amazing the difference the implant makes.
Now what if my implant had failed? Well, I'd be back to square 1. I would have to remember my classmates who could not speak or lipread and follow their examples to get by. I would have missed being able to hear music but I'd have pointed out to myself that I couldn't listen to music for very long due to recruiment. I wouldn't have been happy about the failure but then I knew the risk when I got implanted.
