Your Help Would Be Greatly Appreciated!

[deafdyke]

Then what if the implant breaks? The kid be SOL?
Are you suggesting that you are SOL because you don't have a working CI?

I certainly don't think my child would be SOL without hers.

Well... *evil grin* Grendel, that is b/c you gave Li Li both speech,speechreading AND sign. Li Li is PROOF that you can raise a dhh kid bilingally, without sacrcrifcing one language to work on another. Whereas Bballboy, couldn't function at ALL without his implant.
He couldn't even read lips?!?! THAT to me is extremely extremely sad. It rocks he can hear.....but you know, even in his generation the dorms at Clarke, CID, and St. Joseph's were BOOMING.....and there were a lot of kids who did the boarding experiance and the k-8 experiance....or even the middle school experiance. Which means a lot of kids learned speech as a first language and aquirred ASL as a second language.
I have to say.......I do think auditory oral education should do something like encourage split placement, or have a class for older kids(in public oral programs) so they can learn ASL as a second language, so they have a full toolbox. The world is not a soundbooth. Not everyone is a professional speaker/easy to understand! This is a HOH kid speaking. Yes, it's great that hoh kids can hear and speak.........but why the heck should they have that as their ONLY option? You know, if the oral only movement were all it was cracked up to be, we wouldn't have hoh kids checking in and sayign that "I wish I'd been able to learn ASL in school. Instead all I got was speech therapy." That REALLY says something!
I do think that ASL is going to be just like Braille. Did you know that although Braille is strongly identified with blind education, it wasn't very popular? Kids were encouraged to use residual vision or in recent years, books on tape. One of my friends even went to Perkins School for the Blind, and never got to learn Braille?!?! (that's equliavant to going to a Deaf School and not learning ASL) Guess what? Turns out that of those who are Braille literate are the most sucessful!

 

[deafdyke]

To us, the ability to communicate is as critical and urgent as the need to eat and be safely housed. We didn't wait for her to reach an age of reason to provide her with food and a home as best we could. We weren't willing to sacrifice 4-5 years of language development, leaving her without the ability to communicate throughout such a critical period of development, until she had the reasoning capabilities to decide whether or not she might like to either learn ASL or learn English. Just as we made decisions for her in providing nourishment and security, we also provided her with the means to communicate using two languages -- in our case we chose ASL for her, and later added spoken English

Grendel, awesome post! I think in the old days, it took YEARS and YEARS for deaf kids to aquire hoh level speech. I know that one poster here says that in her EI group, most of the parents of hoh kids are looking into Deaf School and most of the deaf kids are looking into a private oral program. Forty years ago, that would have been the opposite.
I think if the Deaf Schools and the private oral programs can somehow collaborate, we could have deaf kids become truely bilingal.....and I mean I have seen some parents opt for speech schools, and THEN opt to send their kid to Deaf School.
I am relieved that there are parents out there who are listening to those of us who were hoh kids, and who experianced only being oral, and the downsides of being a solotaire.

 

[Buffalo]

happened to me remember?

Just reimplant, all good afterwards. With advances in medical today, the surgery is nbd leaving a real small scar and a few weeks of required resting.


Anyone talking about money, the company WILL pay for the next surgery if implants break, no matter what.

Thank you (and all the other CIers) for the hike in medical insurance.

 

[Buffalo]

I don't have a CI, nor am I deaf, but I wanted to answer the question.

I feel that the child should be involved in the decision. This can be as early or as late as the parent wants, but the best timeframe is between 4ish and 9 (4 being the earliest a child could understand the basics of the procedure and 9 being the end of the language window). At the point where a child is old enough to understand, it should be explained to them in the least biased way that it MIGHT help them hear/understand sounds and that it IS surgery. It's important that they understand these two things AT LEAST, IMO. If they understand, I feel that their choice should be heavily considered.

Basically, I have no problem with CIs as long as the deaf person was involved in the decision to get one.

Honestly, sign language can never truly be obsolete. There will always be Deaf people who won't or can't get a CI. And there are plenty of hearing people that use ASL as well (parents/babies and people with speech disabilities, to name a few). But CIs (if coupled with oralism) do encroach upon it a bit, IMO. So I feel that deaf people with CIs should be exposed to and allowed to participate fully in SL and Deaf culture. And then, if for some reason they decide it's not for them, it will have been their decision.

Does a young kid really understand death (from meningitis)??? I don't think so. That is why I'd rather that the deaf child choose it or not when he/she is adult. I doubt that the parents will tell the child the death part.

Those who are pro-oral are working hard to get rid of ASL. Maybe at the most, ASL will be reserved only for the hearing babies until they learn to speak. The fewer Deaf people know ASL, the fewer rights the Deaf people would have. The hearing people tend to be lazy and will not learn ASL if they can get away with it.

I have pointed out that if a person lose hearing and can't afford HA or CI and he will not be left out if everybody knows SL. It seems that nobody jump on that and learn SL. I guess they think that it won't happen to them.

 

[Frisky Feline]

my hub is sort of SOL but he knows ASL which is fine. But not at his work that hes a supervisor. We struggle with $$ for him. damn CI!

 

[Beach girl]

Then what if the implant breaks? The kid be SOL?

Realistically, how often does that happen? If it does break, it could be fixed, right?

It seems a strange way to go through life, wondering what would happen if something breaks. I buy a new car; if it breaks down miles from home, I'm stranded. I buy a house; if it blows away in a hurricane, I'm homeless. I buy new glasses; if they get broken, I can't see well enough to drive.

All those things are possibilities, but very, very low on the probability scale. I make most decisions in my life going with what is most likely, not what is least likely, to happen. I would guess parents who decided on CIs for their children go through a similar process: what is MOST likely to happen for their child with CIs, versus without? And they decide the pros outweigh the cons.

Doesn't mean it's a fool-proof decision, but seems odd to decide against it on the slim possibility that it might break.

 

[posts from hell]

Realistically, how often does that happen? If it does break, it could be fixed, right?

It seems a strange way to go through life, wondering what would happen if something breaks. I buy a new car; if it breaks down miles from home, I'm stranded. I buy a house; if it blows away in a hurricane, I'm homeless. I buy new glasses; if they get broken, I can't see well enough to drive.

All those things are possibilities, but very, very low on the probability scale. I make most decisions in my life going with what is most likely, not what is least likely, to happen. I would guess parents who decided on CIs for their children go through a similar process: what is MOST likely to happen for their child with CIs, versus without? And they decide the pros outweigh the cons.

Doesn't mean it's a fool-proof decision, but seems odd to decide against it on the slim possibility that it might break.

More often than you would be aware of, actually.

Also, you missed my point completely. See, I don't have a CI. My life is not reliant on a piece of technology.

 

[GrendelQ]

Realistically, how often does that happen? If it does break, it could be fixed, right?

It seems a strange way to go through life, wondering what would happen if something breaks. I buy a new car; if it breaks down miles from home, I'm stranded. I buy a house; if it blows away in a hurricane, I'm homeless. I buy new glasses; if they get broken, I can't see well enough to drive.

All those things are possibilities, but very, very low on the probability scale. I make most decisions in my life going with what is most likely, not what is least likely, to happen. I would guess parents who decided on CIs for their children go through a similar process: what is MOST likely to happen for their child with CIs, versus without? And they decide the pros outweigh the cons.

Doesn't mean it's a fool-proof decision, but seems odd to decide against it on the slim possibility that it might break.

Right, it's definitely not fool-proof. And the 3 main CI companies are very transparent about their reliability stats (for example, here is Cochlear's latest reliability data), here's more, and individual hospitals also maintain stats for their patients by surgeon.

So, for instance, you can see that 93% of the first CIs that came out in 1982 were still operating 23 years later. That means, though, that 7% of those 18,000 receiving the first model had to be repaired, reimplanted, receive a second CI on the other side or forego CIs altogether after the first failed at some point during the past 23 years. Later CI models have shown much better results over time, with the latest model currently running at a 99.96% success rate.

My daughter is currently wearing just one CI for a couple of days-- the other has a magnet jammed at a slight angle in the coil and I don't want her to wear it until fixed, it could rub her contact point a bit raw if I left it on her. No big deal, a replacement sent Friday will arrive this afternoon, and meanwhile she can hear adequately, though not ideally, with one CI. But even if she had only one to begin with and lost the use of that for a few days, she and those around her would simply switch to using ASL-only, and she would rely on her speechreading skills with non-ASL people. This though, as DD pointed out, is one of the reasons why we are very comfortable with her attending a bi-bi school for the deaf: she's not ever SOL. No matter what the state of her technology and what it makes possible for her, she is not in a position to feel that her access to academics or socializing stops dead or is even interrupted if a battery dies or the wind kicks up.

 

[posts from hell]

Right, it's definitely not fool-proof. And the 3 main CI companies are very transparent about their reliability stats (for example, here is Cochlear's latest reliability data), here's more, and individual hospitals also maintain stats for their patients by surgeon.

So, for instance, you can see that 93% of the first CIs that came out in 1982 were still operating 23 years later. That means, though, that 7% of those 18,000 receiving the first model had to be repaired, reimplanted, receive a second CI on the other side or forego CIs altogether after the first failed at some point during the past 23 years. Later CI models have shown much better results over time, with the latest model currently running at a 99.96% success rate.

My daughter is currently wearing just one CI for a couple of days-- the other has a magnet jammed at a slight angle in the coil and I don't want her to wear it until fixed, it could rub her contact point a bit raw if I left it on her. No big deal, a replacement sent Friday will arrive this afternoon, and meanwhile she can hear adequately, though not ideally, with one CI. But even if she had only one to begin with and lost the use of that for a few days, she and those around her would simply switch to using ASL-only, and she would rely on her speechreading skills with non-ASL people. This though, as DD pointed out, is one of the reasons why we are very comfortable with her attending a bi-bi school for the deaf: she's not ever SOL. No matter what the state of her technology and what it makes possible for her, she is not in a position to feel that her access to academics or socializing stops dead or is even interrupted if a battery dies or the wind kicks up.

Keep going, you're improving.

That was what I was talking about and the very reason I directed my question to BaseballBoy, not just everyone here.

I knew ASL was a great way to not be SOL.

 

[Beach girl]

More often than you would be aware of, actually.

Also, you missed my point completely. See, I don't have a CI. My life is not reliant on a piece of technology.

OK, I respect that you don't want to depend on a CI, and I'm in no position to try to persuade a person to use one if they didn't want to. No argument from me.

At the same time though, there's something sort of "keep 'em down on the farm" about that anti-technology argument. In other spheres of life (other than hearing), I'm sure you depend on technology plenty, from big farms who grow or raise most of the food you eat, to the trucks who bring it, and the supermarkets who sell it, to TV and Internet and cars and air-conditioned and appropriately heated buildings and stoves to cook your food and all the other conveniences of daily life.

We all depend on technology. Individuals can pick and choose how much of any given technology they want to use, but as a society, improved technology in all sorts of things makes people eventually depend on it. That doesn't strike me as being particularly nefarious or anything to be afraid of. I'm glad I don't have to raise nearly all my own food, for instance, like my grandmother did.

I'm dependent on technology to see and hear (with HAs, not a CI). I'm ok with that, and I'm extremely grateful to the inventors and engineers and scientists who make it all possible. I'm also dependent on technology to live in a nice house, to drive a nice car, to have the medical care I need when I need it, to have had laproscopic surgery with a tiny scar instead of the old "cut 'em open" type with huge scars afterward, lots of other things.

So people who want CIs are going with the trend of using improved technology to improve their lives. It doesn't force you to do the same, but if they feel it works for them, why be antagonistic towards those people about their choices?

I'm wondering, are you anti-technology in other areas of life, or just specifically about CIs?

 

[posts from hell]

OK, I respect that you don't want to depend on a CI, and I'm in no position to try to persuade a person to use one if they didn't want to. No argument from me.

At the same time though, there's something sort of "keep 'em down on the farm" about that anti-technology argument. In other spheres of life (other than hearing), I'm sure you depend on technology plenty, from big farms who grow or raise most of the food you eat, to the trucks who bring it, and the supermarkets who sell it, to TV and Internet and cars and air-conditioned and appropriately heated buildings and stoves to cook your food and all the other conveniences of daily life.

We all depend on technology. Individuals can pick and choose how much of any given technology they want to use, but as a society, improved technology in all sorts of things makes people eventually depend on it. That doesn't strike me as being particularly nefarious or anything to be afraid of. I'm glad I don't have to raise nearly all my own food, for instance, like my grandmother did.

I'm dependent on technology to see and hear (with HAs, not a CI). I'm ok with that, and I'm extremely grateful to the inventors and engineers and scientists who make it all possible. I'm also dependent on technology to live in a nice house, to drive a nice car, to have the medical care I need when I need it, to have had laproscopic surgery with a tiny scar instead of the old "cut 'em open" type with huge scars afterward, lots of other things.

So people who want CIs are going with the trend of using improved technology to improve their lives. It doesn't force you to do the same, but if they feel it works for them, why be antagonistic towards those people about their choices?

I'm wondering, are you anti-technology in other areas of life, or just specifically about CIs?

I am anti-making-the-person-less-than-whole in any sense. Not anti-technology. Please stay with what I am saying, not spreading it all over the place, ie; my video: rebirth.

Not a single person deserves to go a day without fluid access to communication.

Even in your post you approve of people "depending on CI's". It is so rampant.

 

[Frisky Feline]

I don't blame PFH for feeling that way. My hub could have risked his job due to the CI being lost. He siad if CI is lost and he could have back up with HA but His residental hearing is GONE for good. He is out of luck. Lucky that he has an worn out CI for now while we are trying hard to deal with stupid insurnace to see if they can pay for it or not. we can't afford to pay 8 thousants. my hub admits that he likes CI but he wishes he could know about how hassles with CI for insurance purpose and know how much it costs he may have thought twice but now hes stuck that he NEEDED CI since his residental heairng is damaged by the DR. oh well.

 

[lanapoo]

I like what I see.....

JennyPenny - A PM is being sent your way.

You guys disgust me.

 

[bbaseballboy123]

Thank you (and all the other CIers) for the hike in medical insurance.

lol? do you not realize that cochlear implants dont have all that much affect on medical insurance rates? Its more like fat-ass people who smoke and eat burger king food everyday that take up a lot of medical insurence coverage.



Anyway, Why do people without implants and hearing aids even come to this section of the forum (unless theyre considering getting hearing aids or implants or studying for school)

 

[Beach girl]

I am anti-making-the-person-less-than-whole in any sense. Not anti-technology. Please stay with what I am saying, not spreading it all over the place, ie; my video: rebirth.

Not a single person deserves to go a day without fluid access to communication.

Even in your post you approve of people "depending on CI's". It is so rampant.

Not quite what I said. It's not a matter of my personal approval. My point is that it's a totally individual decision. You have decided no, not for you. Others have decided "yes, I'll do it." Their decision to go for it has zero impact on your decision not to, and vice versa. So why the antagonism? That seems unnecessary.

 

[Frisky Feline]

You guys disgust me.

 

[Jiro]

You guys disgust me.

I see.... you're just jealous...

 

[posts from hell]

Not quite what I said. It's not a matter of my personal approval. My point is that it's a totally individual decision. You have decided no, not for you. Others have decided "yes, I'll do it." Their decision to go for it has zero impact on your decision not to, and vice versa. So why the antagonism? That seems unnecessary.

Why? I've said it so many times here.

I pointed what I see in your thought process out, that is all.

 

[lanapoo]

I see.... you're just jealous...

Not even close...

But she's a high school student. Go find someone closer to your age, you old fart.

 

[lanapoo]

Why? I've said it so many times here.

Don't try to make yourself a "victim" here. We all know that you constantly try to stress your beliefs upon us and influence our "decisions" with what we want to do with our lives. I agree with beach girl. What you've been doing is completely unnecessary. A debate is fine, but the way you talk about your beliefs is almost like you're scolding us for making our own choices.