When my mother and I watched the story later that week (with captions turned on), the focus had shifted. It was no longer about the ethics of animal testing, but about me.
It was one of those “miracle cure” stories. The narrative went along the lines of “this nine-year-old girl who was born profoundly deaf received this revolutionary new technology called a cochlear implant, a bionic ear that has brought her into the hearing world.” The reporter went on to explain how I was one of the first few hundred children to receive a cochlear implant after the FDA approved it for pediatric use in 1991. Interviews with my teacher and other adults popped up where they all said how wonderful I was, making me seem downright angelic, which I most certainly wasn’t.
I felt none of the pride or vanity that might come from having a TV news segment devoted to you. I felt sick and embarrassed. I hoped that my classmates wouldn’t think of me narcissistic or attention-seeking. Something else about the segment made me uneasy. It took me years to pinpoint it. It was the first time I had truly seen that people simply saw what they wanted to see or in this case, heard what they wanted to. The reporter didn’t truly see or hear me. She saw and heard a miracle.Hearing For the First Time isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be
So, when I say getting a cochlear implant changed the course of my life, I am not exaggerating. It introduced a new dimension to my life, which isn’t always a pleasant experience.
What the YouTube videos of babies blinking at the strange sensation and adults crying at the “first sound” don’t tell you is what happens afterwards. The surgery is the easy part. The real work comes afterwards. Nearly all recipients need some training to make sense of their cochlear implants. The time and effort needed for such training varies based on a variety of factors, the most important being the age of implantation and profundity of one’s deafness. I ended up on the more intensive side of the spectrum. I had been too deaf for too long.
After an anticlimactic activation session that wouldn’t have gotten a million views on YouTube, I began to feel — not quite hear — new and disorienting sensations that felt like prickling from within. As a creature of sight and touch, I perceived sound in more familiar terms: feeling. As my brain began to form the neural pathways to perceive and process the noisy world around me, the confusion and disorientation deepened. I understood little of the logic of sound: why some were louder than others; why some elicited people’s attention while others didn’t; and the meaning of any of it. Sound is meaningless until you can ascribe meaning to it. I had to learn how to do that.