First I want to thank all of you who prayed to whomever you pray to. It worked. Richard had the implant last week and yesterday was activated. The photos show a bleary-eyed Richard on his way home from the hospital just three hours after surgery, which lasted four hours. The photo of his incision behind his ear is hard to see but that's because the whole process was so non-invasive. The third is a diagram of the cochlear implant. Anyway, I'll let my brother tell you in his own words about the activation. "So I got activated this afternoon. This means they gave me the speech processor and programmed it at the basic level and testing my ability to hear little beeps and things. Then they actually let me hear environmental sounds, which in this case were Charlotte (his wife) and Darcy (the audiologist/wizard talking. And they sounded just like they were supposed to, which is somewhat astonishing when you think about the technology. Here's the wild part. The world is noisy. Just how noisy I now know --sorta--though she has me set on a very low volume level and will adjust it upwards four times for the next four weeks. Also, the refrigerator is a noisy beast. How do you hearing people manage all this noise?"
Kerry and I have been on vacation in the Northwest celebrating his 60th birthday or I would have posted this sooner. I'll tell you about that in a later post with some pictures.
Again, thank you everyone. It's hard for me to express just how amazing it is to have a brother who can hear. He lost his hearing as a infant so he has no idea about the world of the hearing.
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1 comment:
oh my, he's going to have some huge adjustments to make. it's a good question he asks, how do we stand being able to hear...hopefully he'll be able to do what hearing people do automatically, turn the sound into background. good luck to him.
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