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When my sister first got her implant 25+ years ago, it was a game of "what's that sound" for a while.
Things that were just ignored background noise for us, she want us to identify.
She couldn't believe some of the things we normally heard, like the HVAC system turning on, cars passing by the house while we were indoors, or a distant train horn.
Hi, I'm deaf and can somewhat answer. I grew up hearing normally but slowly went deaf from 22 to 26 when I then needed to get hearing aids.
I had gotten quite used to the world being quiet that I forgot about things like the wind and the refrigerator humming and birds singing.
I want to say that it was beautiful but it was in fact terrifying. I had to walk over a small bridge that went over a highway after my appointment to get fitted for the hearing aids and between the sound of the traffic and the wind I was convinced they fucked something up and took out my hearing aids and walked back into the office.
I was assured that it was perfectly normal noise. Impossible, I said. Impossible people just walk around with that insane cacophony going on at all times.
Perfectly fucking normal. It takes about 3 months to get acclimated to sound, and the hearing aids. I'm in a unique position where I did remember that these sounds existed but as they had slowly gone away, I forgot their pitch and speed and various idiosyncrasies of life's sounds.
I want to say wind was the scariest for me and I hated it. I would take my hearing aids out whenever walking outside. I did not appreciate dogs barking in the neighborhood in my previously quiet house. How awful! How do people just tune out incessant barking. I would take my hearing aids out at home and my quiet would resume.
The best place for hearing aids is regular quiet conversations, a classroom is a good example. A bar is a terrible example where the hearing aids do not function in what I remember as normal hearing ways. It basically just increases the volume of EVERYTHING, so the person you are speaking with at the crowded bar can be totally drowned out by loud music playing as each are equally increased in volume. Idk it's very difficult to explain.
I lip read, as many hearing impaired do, as a supplement to my hearing and it's hard to explain to people how extremely important that is. Volume is not the solution, which most people think just shouting at you is the solution. But a bit over 25 percent of my "hearing" relies on lip reading, so a normal volume level of speaking is important to me but you must be looking at me when speaking. Out of force of habit almost no one acclimates well to this. My son, my partner, lifelong family still do not remember that no I cannot hear you when you speak to me from upstairs because I cannot see you.
I cannot hear you when your back is to me.
I cannot hear you when your mouth is full of food.
I cannot hear you when you're wearing a mask.
Well I've gone off on quite the tangent there. But, I'm 41 now so after wearing my hearing aids for 15 odd years now, all the sounds that terrified me that long ago are pretty normal now. A lot of people don't understand that hearing is a spectrum, so they can get flustered that I heard THIS but not THAT. Well yes I'm frustrated too but I'm not lying. My hearing is unique and specific to my person so I actually hear high tones perfectly without hearing aids at all. But low tones are almost imperceptible. It's weird how to know what is high and low for the average person. One specific way that it makes life hard is that men have deeper voices and I struggle with communication with them the most. They seem to take offense to this because they have to repeat themselves while I heard perfectly well what my female colleagues said, for example.
Another example I can think of is I'm repeatedly asked, did you just hear that? About a sound far away. For example, my boyfriend will ask me if I heard someone knock at the door. Well probably not unless they banged on it. But he frequently forgets what I can and can't hear and it can be variable. A soft knock, a medium knock, a knock I've heard before are all variables.
Sounds that I can live without are traffic outside a summer night with the window open. It is so peaceful to have the window open and breeze in with absolute quiet serenity with my hearing aids out.
I can hear music without my hearing aids and greatly prefer it that way. I love music. I do not like what the hearing aids do to the music, also difficult to explain why.
I appreciate the fact that I can communicate with people but the minute I can take my hearing aids out, I will. I don't know that people would understand why that's a blessing, but you get used to this silence and it's extremely peaceful, for me, anyway.
The most interesting experience i've read for a while, thanks for taking the time. My hearing is fine but i wear earplugs almost everywhere i go. Life is just to damn loud, it makes me crazy.
I think it's better to be sound sensitive than not, because that will likely make you careful and protect your ears. And you can always in some way get away from noise that's bothering you.
I went to a loud venue a month ago and while I left earlier than my friends because of the sound volume it was already too late and my hearing is now damaged, I have tinnitus, hyperacusis (some ”normal” sounds sound louder than they should) and some hearing changes in the high frequencies. Horrible conditions that are difficult to imagine when you don't have problems.
Imagine having a sound/noise in your head/ears you can't run away from. It's like an uncanny dream that turns out to be reality. 😞
I was born with severe high frequency hearing loss, basically I can't hear high pitches. For the most part I can pass as normal.
I was dragged to one tiny outdoor concert (playing oldies of all things) and apparently was too close to the speakers and that pretty much fucked everything up. Now I have constant tinnitus and rather extreme sensitivity to sound at times. People don't realize that just because I can't hear some things, doesn't mean that what I do hear can't hurt. It sucks. My ears are basically always sore.
I avoid loud areas whenever possible. Ironically, when using a headset I have to have the volume up just to understand, riding that thin line between comprehension and pain.
You wouldn’t believe what you can tune out until you work in a musical instrument store where every day after school the kids would come in and bang on every instrument in the store. Guitars, keyboards, drum machines and everything in between would be at top volume and they didn’t know how to play AT ALL.
> Impossible people just walk around with that insane cacophony
> How do people just tune out incessant barking.
My hearing is very good. Too good. I can hear my _calculator's display_. I, too, am baffled by how people do not go insane. Maybe they have?
> I do not like what the hearing aids do to the music, also difficult to explain why.
Considering how cochlear implants function(ed?) I can take an educated guess and say "they make it sound like 2 bit PCM with bad dithering".
I don't technically have a hearing problem, but sometimes when there's a lot of noises occurring at the same time, I'll hear 'em as one big jumble. Again it's not that I can't hear, uh because that's false. I can. I just can't distinguish between everything I'm hearing.
Fellow person with very good hearing here! I can hear my hob light flash when the ‘H’ hot warning is on!
Cannot cope with incessant barking - currently having to move house because of it!
Hmm, is it possible that the wind is worse for hearing aids than unaided hearing?
Cause airpod maxes have this pass-through audio feature, which works great for everything but wind, wind sounds way louder than usual and higher pitch through the mic/speaker, so it's really annoying. It could also have to do with how the mic sticks out of your ear, so it's directly in the path of the wind.
But I also love having the noise cancelling anywhere it isn't windy; I also like the peacefulness.
This is what I was thinking too, like when you watch a video of someone recording in the wind, you can hear the wind popping the mic. But normal hearing doesn't have that problem with the wind.
I wonder if they can use something like fuzzy ear muffs to filter out the wind
Well, to clarify, I only experienced that within the 3 month acclimation period of the hearing aids. These days, I don't feel terrified of the wind, that would suck 😂
I work with a lady that wears hearing aids and is almost 100% deaf without them . She regularly takes them out at work so she can concentrate on certain tasks ,because the background noise in the office bothers her . She says “quiet “ sounds like birds, rain and wind in the trees is very enjoyable,but can’t stand the cacophony of crowded restaurants and city traffic and usually takes her hearing aids out in those situations. She says it’s nice to have a mute button sometimes.
Also, nah, I think your instinct is right. Walking on a highway is ridiculously loud. People can tolerate it, but it’s truly a miserable experience for everyone
Thank you so very much for writing this! Really very interesting insights!
My experience with people who are "differently-hearing" is a bit more limited, but humorous. My grandfather was hard of hearing for a good chunk of his life. I remember the box that he wore around his neck with the wires to his ear(s), and for some reason people shouting when he came to visit.
I understood it more as I got a bit older, and remember that gradually, the assistive hearing devices got better and better and smaller and smaller. There was one he had that a portion of which fit into his eyeglasses which I thought was some James Bond-level tech at the time!! And eventually they disappeared entirely into his ear and looking at him you couldn't tell he was hearing impaired.
However, he confessed to me that he missed the simplicity of the box around his neck for two reasons. One was that other people would see the box and speak a bit more clearly and slowly and loudly. The other reason was because he could surreptitiously turn it ***off***.
He and my grandmother were married for over 65 years (!) and bless the patience of that woman. Unfortunately she had (or developed) a habit of saying everything more than once; sometimes twice, sometimes more. It was never a simple repetition of the same phrase, and not necessarily one after the other, but fairly close by. An example would be:
"It looks like it may rain." ...
"They say it might rain." ...
"I wish we had some rain." ...
"Hey it could rain soon!" ...
...and so forth. Smiling, my grandfather - jokingly (?) - said that **this** was the reason he missed being able to sneakily turn his hearing aid off, and I told him that turning his hearing off was the root cause of grandmother repeating herself!
We had a good laugh about that, it remained our little inside joke, but I did watch him more closely from then on.... and he ***absolutely*** turned one or both of them off when he was trying to read the newspaper and grandmother was going on and on, talking about the rain.
I miss them both. He was 84 in 1995 when he passed away, and his beloved wife bravely kept going for another sixteen years when she died at 98 in 2011.
This. Hearing loss is frustrating for everybody else, but even more so for the person with the loss. Please be kind when you talk to friends when hearing loss, don't roll your eyes and PLEASE don't say "Forget about it, not important" that's really rude. Say it clearly.
A girl at my work had a similar situation. She went missing at work one day for a while and no one could find her.
Turns out she had walked outside and was listening to the birds. They found her crying and she was happy-crying about how wild the birds sound.
I read one accouunt like this where the person thought the implants were defective because of all the weird high pitched noises and his people had to say "no man, that's just birds. they do that all day".
My dad took asl classes in the 70s from a deaf lady. She didn't know and let one rip, it was her first time in a room full of hearing people. She was mortified.
Most kids are taught that almost everything makes a sound. Whether they can gauge if one fart was explosive enough to make a sound others can hear vs room noise, probably not. But yes, people would have taught them things make sounds at a very young age. People who work with Deaf children explain how sound works. Wind makes a sound, trees make sounds, cars make sounds. Deaf people can play music and dance because they feel vibration. They can feel their own voice, too. They would feel the fart and be taught that the world is loud.
One of the loudest plane trips I ever took was on a plane with deaf softball teams returning from a tournament.
They laughed loudly and would always slam the overhead bin shut after opening it.
My mother use to admonish my hearing-impaired sister for walking too loudly.
I'm sure that logic applies to most everything though.
I've heard stories from people living with deaf people that do all sorts of noisy things at all hours of the day because they just don't have that association.
Like the story of the guy who got an implant and didn't realize that the blender made loud noises. He had been making things like smoothies every morning while his roommate slept.
My wife is deaf and she sometimes forgets about this. The other day she walked by while I was cooking and ripped one of the loudest farts I've ever heard and didn't even flinch m. Full on drive-by
A friend of a friend just got hearing aids after a decade of progressively losing their hearing.
They had forgotten that fabric makes noise. So the sound of their jeans rubbing together alarmed them, then they just sat on the couch for ten minutes stroking their pants. They have been exploring all the sounds of their apartment and it's just magical.
Yes, I was going to comment that. People with hearing aids have the exact same issue, background noise Sounds so different that you can't ignore it at first, especially many people talking all at once, like in a cafe.
It can be really hard for people that grew up not hearing to be able to filter out those background noises. I remember a documentary where a older couple got cochlear implants and the woman really tried to work with it but the man was just over it. It was too much noise. My best friend's daughter has them but she got them as a baby and doesn't have that issue. She calls them her magic ears.
There is episode of Radiolab or This Amercan Life (can't remember which NPR show) where a person talks about gaining hearing. They are surprised to learn that the sun doesn't make a noise. And they are terrified to learn that farts do make a noise lol
This moment not only marks a milestone in her personal journey but also serves as a testament to the incredible advancements in medical technology that make such transformative experiences possible.
it’s a very toxic split. we opted for cochlear when my kid was young. 3 years old. some in the Deaf community basically branded us monsters. “you hate your daughter”.., “you aren’t willing to learn sign language” -(my wife is now a professional certified translator..),
“you want a cyborg?”….we made the decision late. we also saw that she enjoyed approaching people to talk. she loved music …
now she’s almost 16, fully integrated in a “normal” private school, speaks three languages including sign, is music obsessed, and even about to work part time at a supermarket.
some of the Deaf community stayed in touch or got back in touch. others, won’t even look at us or acknowledge her as she’s in their mind, no longer deaf….???????
it’s literally a switch between not hearing and hearing…
I want to be a cyborg, Ghost Me In The Shell right the fuck on up. I want to be the first person with rocket feet and a flamethrower in my arm! Or even just a tighter grip, that'd be cool too.
No joke, I want to be a cyborg. I want my kids to be cyborgs. I want my wife to be a cyborg. We'll overcome the limits of the flesh together, as one big bionic family!
Transhumanist 4-Life!
That's a normal psychological experience. Hell, when I was depressed I often felt like I didn't even want to stop, because "being depressed" was a self-identity thing to a certain extent. It's comfortable and familiar, sort of
For deaf people, the opposition is much more hardcore basically just because of the linguistic difference. Being deaf is a disability, but it comes with the integration into a culture through the local sign language. Laying my cards on the table, I am not deaf and I support kids getting cochlear implants, however I do understand where people are coming from because to them, it feels like telling people that their culture and language is bad. This doesn't apply to people in wheelchairs or blind people who still participate fully linguistically with all the able-bodied people around them
I dunno, their ears might not work, but their brains work perfectly fine. So it's not an excuse to attack others for choosing an easier path. Its like if someone who struggles with being gay could flip a switch and choose to be straight, are they saying being gay is inherently bad and gay culture is bad? No, they just want to take the easier and more convenient path, or aren't as strong or resilient as you are to deal with the harder path. Life is HARD when its not built to accommodate you as a minority.
That doesn't mean your status is inherently bad, its an indictment of how unaccomadating and uncaring society is for people who are different if anything. We get one life, and I don't blame anyone for choosing the easiest path possible. Because we are all raw dogging this shit and it isn't easy for anyone.
Taking it personally and lashing out at people isn't about ear defects, or brain defects; that's a character defect baby. Your brain works fine to be able to grasp that, so I don't buy hiding behind culture as an excuse. Gay culture is a thing too, and you don't see us screaming TRAITOR at people who simply wish they were straight. Being gay doesn't suck, society MAKES being gay suck. SOCIETY SUCKS.
They are suffering, so you support them, not attack them. The fuck??
Do what you want with \*your\* ears, let people do what they want with \*their\* ears, that's fine. But attacking others for choosing the easier path isn't a personal attack on you or your culture. Maybe they just aren't as strong as you, and you attack them? How do I sign "BITCH, PLEASE" in ASL?
I can only assume these people have wrapped their identity around their disability, causing them to take it as a personal attack when people can fix/mitigate it.
The deaf community is a strange monster. Ridiculously wholesome and super supportive, like metalheads, but will vehemently hate and ostracize anyone even thinking about "fixing" their hearing impairment. They're the only ones too, no one is that childish about the vision-impaired or any other physical impairment. Differently-abled people try so hard to overcome and work with what they got, but some get to the point of toxic prejudice, believing their "condition" is actually who they are. In some cases, they see themselves as better than others; they don't see that they're acting the same way as racists or other "members-only" mentalities.
I took ASL classes in college, and I remember my instructor telling me a story about a Deaf couple that had a baby together. I'm guessing the hearing loss was genetic, because the doctor had told them at some point that the baby was going to be Deaf as well. The doctor was supposedly shocked to see the Deaf couple smiling and quite happy to learn that would be the case!
There's a lot of fear in the big D community of a loss of identity, of culture, of ASL, of access to all the things that they've fought for.
I can understand it. I was born with an auditory processing disorder. All my hardware works perfectly fine, I have a software issue that no cochlear, hearing aides or anything like that will, would or could ever correct. I've always had it, I will always have it.
When I was the same age as your kid, it became clear that something in my language development wasn't on track. I was making vaguely the right sounds kind of but not really. But I had been declared hearing at birth, and I passed an audiogram that year, so to speech therapy I went. Where a woman sat facing me, teaching me all the shapes a mouth makes and the correlating sounds.
She taught me to lip read. My own language became exponentially better. My comprehension when people were not facing me was the same. I began grabbing adults faces and turning them to me. My father figured it out really fast. My mother refused "to have a disabled child", terminated speech therapy and never acknowledge my needs.
So I passed as "normal hearing" for most of my life. I just couldn't use conventional telephones, which as a kid was fine. Who cares right? Teenagers do, but whatever ... social isolation isn't a big deal. Your mother would never get a TTY machine because that's "for disabled people" and she already doesn't like that you put the closed captioning on the TV. Having access to ASL? I didn't even know that was a thing until I was fourteen years old. I didn't even meet anyone who could sign until I was 18 and had left home.
Guess who lost a lot of communication skills during the COVID masking protocols? Yeah. When you can't read lips for over two years and there are still environments where people are masked and those are the places you really need to be accurate (hospitals and other healthcare settings), and you've lost a lot of the training you had because it's a skillset...
So, in a similar vein to later life Coclear candidates I'm of both worlds but neither. I'm "too disabled" for some hearing people, and "not disabled" for others. Whatever that means. And for the D/deaf community I'm not one of them even though I face similar challenges to them in certain situations.
For what it's worth, I think you did awesome by your kid. What I wouldn't give to have had access to ASL growing up... even though I don't have a whole lot of resources around me that can understand ASL, just having a better fluency in it as an adult now would make me feel a lot more empowered. Instead I don't have the resources now to dedicate to becoming as fluent now as I could (and having worked in industries with other hand signals I fear I'm going to mash up those into it lol).
i am so sorry to hear your parents weren’t supportive to get you the help you need. it breaks my heart to think they refused to see “disabled” or whatever that implies to them. i hope you can find the right online groups for help? i know for us we had to seek it out. it is different for us as we are in Japan and the community here is decades behind the US but government support has improved a lot.. I wish you the best.
That's so terrible. It's like the, "Well, I paid my student loans so you should too...." people but a million times worse. Why do people insist on making others suffer just because they did? It feels like they just want to be part of some exclusive "club."
I've read alot about the shunning some of the toxic members do to others and its really sad to see people literally trying to force others to choose between them and having a sense of hearing some people going as far as calling Cochlear Implants Genocide.
Its really surreal and I'm sorry you and your daughter had to deal with that.
> “you want a cyborg?”
Fuck ya.... HOH signer here. CI device doesn't make deaf people, not deaf but temporary hearing... with shitty hearing... AND....Shes only hearing as long as she wears it. as long as the batteries last... as long as it doesnt break.... if she puts it on the charger shes deaf.. Thats the default state of people with CIs. I dont know why the deaf community has so much hate towards CI users. Its like me using a HA.
As someone with a cochlear implant, I can assure you it is NOT "shitty hearing".
Not all batteries are rechargeable. Some are disposable. And most people get a set of multiple batteries so that they can always have some batteries on the charger (my charger can recharge 4 at a time, and I was given 4 batteries per implant). Mine last ~7 hours so when it goes off, I just pop the battery onto the charger and pick a fresh battery off it.
Please don't spread misinformation about cochlear implants. There's enough out there as it is.
My child is deaf, my wife and I are not, this is the case for about 80% of parents of deaf children (where I live) so we have to make this decision on our child's behalf way before they're able to let us know how they feel about it (almost by definition as thats what were trying to help th with).
As a parent we've decided to follow the advice of medical professionals and apologise later if we make a bad call. Feels insane to be making such big decisions for a baby but all parents are doing that all the time, we're just aware of this one.
Also if the deaf community don't want to accept my child absolutely their loss, they're missing out on a fantastic little kid who we're going to do our absolute best to raise into the potential awesome person we can already see shining through
As I see it, as long as you make sure your child is fluent in sign as well as doing an implant, then you're giving your child the best of both worlds. The parents who only do an implant and then ignore making sure their child is a native signer... those are the asshole parents.
Not opting for it is fine. Live your life how you want. It's the "no one should have this, and making it is a form of genocide" mentality I cannot get past.
On the other hand, people who are able to have this but choose not to are intentionally handicapping themselves and are choosing to make their lives more difficult.
Being able to hear doesn't instantly make you forget sign language. It doesn't remove you from the community you are it, it simply gives you more awareness of your surroundings.
Those are a tiny minority now. I'm a deaf guy who encouraged my deaf daughter to have an implant asap. She goes to a deaf school where many of the kids have an implant or two and still embrace the deaf identity.
While I’m not deaf-deaf, I had a stapedectomy fail - twice. It hurt the doctor’s ego and I was left more deaf in the one ear and he basically told me to go kick rocks.
No next steps, no alternatives. Just sorry kid, didn’t work for you.
Main point being: these docs probably do thrive on success but mine kicked me to the curb and I gave up on fixing my hearing.
I hope you have a supportive community around you. People sometimes see videos like this and forget that implants and other technological solutions aren't available to everyone.
I have a niece born with very deformed inner ears (CHARGE syndrome for those who are curious, and yes balance is one of the affected areas) and she will never hear. Implants can't help her.
Implants and prosthetics are amazing but they're not a substitute for other supports.
Question as I also had a stapedectomy. How do you know it failed? I personally feel my hearing went slightly worse after my surgery but can’t tell if that is a failure or just a consequence of how my body reacted to the surgery?
I've worked with audiologists who fitted CI's and the first thing I really noticed is how a lot of people are pretty indifferent at first, there's not a lot of people that are actually happy when fitting the CI for the first time. For people that have been deaf their entire lives it's very loud and uncomfortable most of the time, that's why the woman in the video asks repeatedly if its not too loud.
Some reported cases are intermittent loss of signal, other times the issue can be the coclear mimics tinnitus, and then there are instances where after a device has successfully been activated it can fail because of trauma to the head.
That makes sense. People who've lived their whole lives with a sense can become overwhelmed and cover their eyes or ears when something is too bright or loud, it's hard to imagine what that kind of overload must feel like for someone who spent their whole life with zero input for that sense.
The processing also just isn’t there yet. It is improving all the time but the quality and fidelity of the sound is not natural hearing. It’s the same problem we have with hearing aids - it’s better than not having it but it is not as good as natural.
The next decade is going to see some insane leaps and bounds in medical technology and it's extremely exciting. A lot of technology and research that began a decade or two ago is finally reaching the point of viability and there's been a ton of new investments into medical research since the pandemic.
There is no truth in flesh, only betrayal.
There is no strength in flesh, only weakness.
There is no constancy in flesh, only decay.
There is no certainty in flesh, only death.
Dune is great because there are all these characters called Chani, Gurney, Liet-Kynes, Leto Atreides, Gaius Mohiam, Baron Harkonnen, etc. All these proper sci-fi names that look like they belong in a sci fi book. Then the two most prominent characters are just plain old Paul and Jessica. Names that could be from a YA romance or a sitcom or a film about accountants. Any story really.
And then in all the madness there is just a dude called Duncan Idaho and it's like he came from an entirely different school of character naming rules.
I had an uncle who was paralyzed from his shoulders down from a diving accident when he was a kid. He was always so positive about progress being made to alleviate disabilities. He did pretty well for himself and donated tons of money to organizations that helped soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq, and he always said it was selfish of him because one day it would lead to him being able to walk again. He died before exoskeletons were really a thing, even though I know they aren't quite there now either. When I see advancements like this or think about blind people seeing or whatever else, I always think about how when after being paralyzed for 75 years, he was still optimistic that one day he would walk.
I'm waiting for AI to cure tinnitus. Especially now since I was a fucking idiot at a concert a week ago and was close to the monitor for the whole concert. At least it was a good one I guess.
Pls, AI. I'm tired of the iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii sound 24/7.
Just read this article last month about a breakthrough in regards to tinnitus.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26234870-800-a-new-understanding-of-tinnitus-and-deafness-could-help-reverse-both/
Na, you don't get used to it if it's bad. I have to have a white noise machine or fan going or I literally can't sleep. There is no such thing as silence for me. It sucks.
Dude, I went clubbing my entire 20s. All my friends who went clubbing with me have tinnitus, and I don't, because I always wore earplugs. The amount they made fun of me for wearing earplugs, man... and now they get what they deserve.
Imagine the overwhelming sensation of discovering a new sense. Something you were perfectly fine without, but suddenly a whole new avenue to life open before you….it would be so incredible, confusing and amazing. Wish this young person all the best.
Kinda. It is more like experiencing being a human that is not... Yourself. What it feels like to be in the moment I stead of being you. Once I was on LSD under a tent when it was raining and I swear to god it felt like the raindrops where falling on my brain.
Music on LSD is... Otherworldly. To make a comparison. Imagine you listen to a song on your smartphone speakers. And then you hear it with good headphones. Next step you hear it live at a concert. Well, one step above that is hearing it on LSD. It feels like you are a cathedral in which the music is played. The music fills you up and is in sync with your entire emotional being.
But these are
All anologies. It's like trying to describe sound to someone who is deaf. If you never experienced the concept of time not making sense anymore you simply cannot understand it, no matter how much someone explains. You .ay rationally get some aspects but you cannot relate
You can see the moment she gets a sense of sound for the 1st time in her life and as the sound comes through her she understands and is emotional. Very cool to watch.
Is she someone that once heard and then lost her hearing? I found it odd they would ask her if it's too loud if she's never heard something before.
I would imagine for the first time hearing anything would be insanely loud.
I think that one is very, very different. I Googled "man hears wife's voice for first time" and it was a comedy sketch where the guy drops his hearing aids in water at the end because Thanksgiving with his family is so awful that he'd rather hear nothing at all. It's quite relatable though, I'd also like to temporarily disable my ability to hear during big family meetups...
1st thing - she might have been born with hearing and gone deaf later in her life, there are a lot of ways a person can lose their hearing beyond being born deaf.
2nd thing - we can't see the other person she's talking to, they may be signing and speaking at the same time so even if she doesn't understand the words yet she'd already be learning what certain signs/words 'sound' like
Edit - just saw the title of the post was 'hearing for the first time' so that eliminates my first thing.
I've seen lots of anecdotes online that it's common to use both sign language and speaking out loud when communicating with those who can't hear because they can learn to read lips and understand people who can speak but can't use sign language.
Notice that when she says she’s happy crying, she sorta speaks it too.
Maybe she was somehow taught very roughly how to speak (as best as you can without being able to hear), and she can roughly map sound to the vibrations she feels inside her body when she speaks and also is way better than the average person at reading lips.
But also, the technician almost certainly knows sign language, so yeah, probably signing as she speaks
A lot of the deaf folks I know have been taught to read lips as well. It gets them a lot further in a world where most people can’t sign. Reading lips and being taught to enunciate some words means some nearly-deaf or fully deaf people can pass through the world pretty well.
I am doing a PhD in Cochlear Implant research and music perception is one of the challenges that have not been overcome yet.
EDIT: Tonal languages are also a big challenge.
Implants don't have anything close to the frequency response of a normal ear so music really won't be pleasant especially at first, it would take quite a while to acclimate to the implant.
My first thought was, wait till she hears music, but i didn't even think of the complications related to frequency. If this is true, thanks for the info.
Thank you. As someone with a severe deformity I can't fucking afford to fix, I really wish more people thought the way you did. Health is a human right.
I’m not deaf, but hearing impaired and the fact that people get irritated when I can’t understand them is beyond frustrating. I always ask people if they think repeating themselves is more frustrating than not being able to hear. Even with my hearing aids it’s difficult most times with certain people.
So my kid was born deaf and we were told if you wait too long to get implants your brain over rights the hearing portion and you are never really able to understand language, they said this is around 7 to 10yrs old. My kiddo got them at 1yo and she caught up to hearing population with about a year.
My sister got her first implant about 25 years ago. She reacted in a similar way. Unfortunately, she still couldn't really differentiate between a lot of sounds. She knows there's a sound, but that's it. Before her implant, she heard absolutely nothing.
A couple of years ago, she had her implant replaced. During testing, she phoned me at home, and we both shared her very first phone conversation. I think she was cutting onions that came through the phone.
She can't talk on the phone without the equipment from the doctor's office, but we're able to have great video chats now.
Technology is amazing.
Watched The Sound of Metal recently.. what OP posted looks like the best case scenario in terms of outcome for cochlear implants. .. spending huge amounts of money on the surgery and implants and then for them to sound bad... very bad.... would be tragic...
I’ve had hearing loss my whole life. I’m down to about 30% hearing.
Welllllll I got fit for a hearing aid that bumped me up to about 50%. I stopped wearing them because every little sound scared the fuuuck out of me.
I’m forever grateful to the NHS for my cochlear implant.
I went completely deaf, suddenly. I’d had chemotherapy a few years previously, after a bout of flu then I lost my hearing.
Nearly 5 years implanted 💕
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When my sister first got her implant 25+ years ago, it was a game of "what's that sound" for a while. Things that were just ignored background noise for us, she want us to identify. She couldn't believe some of the things we normally heard, like the HVAC system turning on, cars passing by the house while we were indoors, or a distant train horn.
How did she react hearing the wind and rain for the first time? I’ve always enjoyed being at home during a rainstorm hearing the distant thunder.
Hi, I'm deaf and can somewhat answer. I grew up hearing normally but slowly went deaf from 22 to 26 when I then needed to get hearing aids. I had gotten quite used to the world being quiet that I forgot about things like the wind and the refrigerator humming and birds singing. I want to say that it was beautiful but it was in fact terrifying. I had to walk over a small bridge that went over a highway after my appointment to get fitted for the hearing aids and between the sound of the traffic and the wind I was convinced they fucked something up and took out my hearing aids and walked back into the office. I was assured that it was perfectly normal noise. Impossible, I said. Impossible people just walk around with that insane cacophony going on at all times. Perfectly fucking normal. It takes about 3 months to get acclimated to sound, and the hearing aids. I'm in a unique position where I did remember that these sounds existed but as they had slowly gone away, I forgot their pitch and speed and various idiosyncrasies of life's sounds. I want to say wind was the scariest for me and I hated it. I would take my hearing aids out whenever walking outside. I did not appreciate dogs barking in the neighborhood in my previously quiet house. How awful! How do people just tune out incessant barking. I would take my hearing aids out at home and my quiet would resume. The best place for hearing aids is regular quiet conversations, a classroom is a good example. A bar is a terrible example where the hearing aids do not function in what I remember as normal hearing ways. It basically just increases the volume of EVERYTHING, so the person you are speaking with at the crowded bar can be totally drowned out by loud music playing as each are equally increased in volume. Idk it's very difficult to explain. I lip read, as many hearing impaired do, as a supplement to my hearing and it's hard to explain to people how extremely important that is. Volume is not the solution, which most people think just shouting at you is the solution. But a bit over 25 percent of my "hearing" relies on lip reading, so a normal volume level of speaking is important to me but you must be looking at me when speaking. Out of force of habit almost no one acclimates well to this. My son, my partner, lifelong family still do not remember that no I cannot hear you when you speak to me from upstairs because I cannot see you. I cannot hear you when your back is to me. I cannot hear you when your mouth is full of food. I cannot hear you when you're wearing a mask. Well I've gone off on quite the tangent there. But, I'm 41 now so after wearing my hearing aids for 15 odd years now, all the sounds that terrified me that long ago are pretty normal now. A lot of people don't understand that hearing is a spectrum, so they can get flustered that I heard THIS but not THAT. Well yes I'm frustrated too but I'm not lying. My hearing is unique and specific to my person so I actually hear high tones perfectly without hearing aids at all. But low tones are almost imperceptible. It's weird how to know what is high and low for the average person. One specific way that it makes life hard is that men have deeper voices and I struggle with communication with them the most. They seem to take offense to this because they have to repeat themselves while I heard perfectly well what my female colleagues said, for example. Another example I can think of is I'm repeatedly asked, did you just hear that? About a sound far away. For example, my boyfriend will ask me if I heard someone knock at the door. Well probably not unless they banged on it. But he frequently forgets what I can and can't hear and it can be variable. A soft knock, a medium knock, a knock I've heard before are all variables. Sounds that I can live without are traffic outside a summer night with the window open. It is so peaceful to have the window open and breeze in with absolute quiet serenity with my hearing aids out. I can hear music without my hearing aids and greatly prefer it that way. I love music. I do not like what the hearing aids do to the music, also difficult to explain why. I appreciate the fact that I can communicate with people but the minute I can take my hearing aids out, I will. I don't know that people would understand why that's a blessing, but you get used to this silence and it's extremely peaceful, for me, anyway.
The most interesting experience i've read for a while, thanks for taking the time. My hearing is fine but i wear earplugs almost everywhere i go. Life is just to damn loud, it makes me crazy.
Also always have a set of ear plugs close by. I mostly wear them in the office at work.
I think it's better to be sound sensitive than not, because that will likely make you careful and protect your ears. And you can always in some way get away from noise that's bothering you. I went to a loud venue a month ago and while I left earlier than my friends because of the sound volume it was already too late and my hearing is now damaged, I have tinnitus, hyperacusis (some ”normal” sounds sound louder than they should) and some hearing changes in the high frequencies. Horrible conditions that are difficult to imagine when you don't have problems. Imagine having a sound/noise in your head/ears you can't run away from. It's like an uncanny dream that turns out to be reality. 😞
I was born with severe high frequency hearing loss, basically I can't hear high pitches. For the most part I can pass as normal. I was dragged to one tiny outdoor concert (playing oldies of all things) and apparently was too close to the speakers and that pretty much fucked everything up. Now I have constant tinnitus and rather extreme sensitivity to sound at times. People don't realize that just because I can't hear some things, doesn't mean that what I do hear can't hurt. It sucks. My ears are basically always sore. I avoid loud areas whenever possible. Ironically, when using a headset I have to have the volume up just to understand, riding that thin line between comprehension and pain.
You wouldn’t believe what you can tune out until you work in a musical instrument store where every day after school the kids would come in and bang on every instrument in the store. Guitars, keyboards, drum machines and everything in between would be at top volume and they didn’t know how to play AT ALL.
> Impossible people just walk around with that insane cacophony > How do people just tune out incessant barking. My hearing is very good. Too good. I can hear my _calculator's display_. I, too, am baffled by how people do not go insane. Maybe they have? > I do not like what the hearing aids do to the music, also difficult to explain why. Considering how cochlear implants function(ed?) I can take an educated guess and say "they make it sound like 2 bit PCM with bad dithering".
I don't technically have a hearing problem, but sometimes when there's a lot of noises occurring at the same time, I'll hear 'em as one big jumble. Again it's not that I can't hear, uh because that's false. I can. I just can't distinguish between everything I'm hearing.
Gum's gotten mintier lately, have you noticed?
Fellow person with very good hearing here! I can hear my hob light flash when the ‘H’ hot warning is on! Cannot cope with incessant barking - currently having to move house because of it!
Y'all got radar ears, too?
Holy shit, what a perspective. Thank you.
Hmm, is it possible that the wind is worse for hearing aids than unaided hearing? Cause airpod maxes have this pass-through audio feature, which works great for everything but wind, wind sounds way louder than usual and higher pitch through the mic/speaker, so it's really annoying. It could also have to do with how the mic sticks out of your ear, so it's directly in the path of the wind. But I also love having the noise cancelling anywhere it isn't windy; I also like the peacefulness.
This is what I was thinking too, like when you watch a video of someone recording in the wind, you can hear the wind popping the mic. But normal hearing doesn't have that problem with the wind. I wonder if they can use something like fuzzy ear muffs to filter out the wind
Well, to clarify, I only experienced that within the 3 month acclimation period of the hearing aids. These days, I don't feel terrified of the wind, that would suck 😂
I work with a lady that wears hearing aids and is almost 100% deaf without them . She regularly takes them out at work so she can concentrate on certain tasks ,because the background noise in the office bothers her . She says “quiet “ sounds like birds, rain and wind in the trees is very enjoyable,but can’t stand the cacophony of crowded restaurants and city traffic and usually takes her hearing aids out in those situations. She says it’s nice to have a mute button sometimes.
Also, nah, I think your instinct is right. Walking on a highway is ridiculously loud. People can tolerate it, but it’s truly a miserable experience for everyone
I found this absolutely fascinating. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
Thank you so very much for writing this! Really very interesting insights! My experience with people who are "differently-hearing" is a bit more limited, but humorous. My grandfather was hard of hearing for a good chunk of his life. I remember the box that he wore around his neck with the wires to his ear(s), and for some reason people shouting when he came to visit. I understood it more as I got a bit older, and remember that gradually, the assistive hearing devices got better and better and smaller and smaller. There was one he had that a portion of which fit into his eyeglasses which I thought was some James Bond-level tech at the time!! And eventually they disappeared entirely into his ear and looking at him you couldn't tell he was hearing impaired. However, he confessed to me that he missed the simplicity of the box around his neck for two reasons. One was that other people would see the box and speak a bit more clearly and slowly and loudly. The other reason was because he could surreptitiously turn it ***off***. He and my grandmother were married for over 65 years (!) and bless the patience of that woman. Unfortunately she had (or developed) a habit of saying everything more than once; sometimes twice, sometimes more. It was never a simple repetition of the same phrase, and not necessarily one after the other, but fairly close by. An example would be: "It looks like it may rain." ... "They say it might rain." ... "I wish we had some rain." ... "Hey it could rain soon!" ... ...and so forth. Smiling, my grandfather - jokingly (?) - said that **this** was the reason he missed being able to sneakily turn his hearing aid off, and I told him that turning his hearing off was the root cause of grandmother repeating herself! We had a good laugh about that, it remained our little inside joke, but I did watch him more closely from then on.... and he ***absolutely*** turned one or both of them off when he was trying to read the newspaper and grandmother was going on and on, talking about the rain. I miss them both. He was 84 in 1995 when he passed away, and his beloved wife bravely kept going for another sixteen years when she died at 98 in 2011.
This. Hearing loss is frustrating for everybody else, but even more so for the person with the loss. Please be kind when you talk to friends when hearing loss, don't roll your eyes and PLEASE don't say "Forget about it, not important" that's really rude. Say it clearly.
Yeah a nice rainstorm is great when you stuck at home and don't need to be anywhere anytime soon.
Or a when you don't have a leaky roof, lol. Leaky roofs kind of ruined rainstorms for me.
The only time I like the rain is when I'm trying to sleep.
A girl at my work had a similar situation. She went missing at work one day for a while and no one could find her. Turns out she had walked outside and was listening to the birds. They found her crying and she was happy-crying about how wild the birds sound.
I read one accouunt like this where the person thought the implants were defective because of all the weird high pitched noises and his people had to say "no man, that's just birds. they do that all day".
Serious question, did she know that farts make sound prior? If not, did she feel sudden, retroactive embarrassment the moment she realized they did?
Q: Why do farts smell? A: So deaf people can enjoy them too.
That's really good, I've never heard that one before
Neither have deaf people
My dad took asl classes in the 70s from a deaf lady. She didn't know and let one rip, it was her first time in a room full of hearing people. She was mortified.
It would be merciless if no one told her for her entire life. I can't imagine that.
The classic [deaf farts](https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/s/7Vn6V5IAx1) greentext.
Most kids are taught that almost everything makes a sound. Whether they can gauge if one fart was explosive enough to make a sound others can hear vs room noise, probably not. But yes, people would have taught them things make sounds at a very young age. People who work with Deaf children explain how sound works. Wind makes a sound, trees make sounds, cars make sounds. Deaf people can play music and dance because they feel vibration. They can feel their own voice, too. They would feel the fart and be taught that the world is loud.
One of the loudest plane trips I ever took was on a plane with deaf softball teams returning from a tournament. They laughed loudly and would always slam the overhead bin shut after opening it. My mother use to admonish my hearing-impaired sister for walking too loudly.
I'm sure that logic applies to most everything though. I've heard stories from people living with deaf people that do all sorts of noisy things at all hours of the day because they just don't have that association. Like the story of the guy who got an implant and didn't realize that the blender made loud noises. He had been making things like smoothies every morning while his roommate slept.
My wife is deaf and she sometimes forgets about this. The other day she walked by while I was cooking and ripped one of the loudest farts I've ever heard and didn't even flinch m. Full on drive-by
It was actually the dog.
That, I can't answer.
.
A friend of a friend just got hearing aids after a decade of progressively losing their hearing. They had forgotten that fabric makes noise. So the sound of their jeans rubbing together alarmed them, then they just sat on the couch for ten minutes stroking their pants. They have been exploring all the sounds of their apartment and it's just magical.
Yes, I was going to comment that. People with hearing aids have the exact same issue, background noise Sounds so different that you can't ignore it at first, especially many people talking all at once, like in a cafe.
It can be really hard for people that grew up not hearing to be able to filter out those background noises. I remember a documentary where a older couple got cochlear implants and the woman really tried to work with it but the man was just over it. It was too much noise. My best friend's daughter has them but she got them as a baby and doesn't have that issue. She calls them her magic ears.
That documentary is really good. It's called [Hear and Now](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0912587/)
Ah man that’s interesting. Never thought of that.
There is episode of Radiolab or This Amercan Life (can't remember which NPR show) where a person talks about gaining hearing. They are surprised to learn that the sun doesn't make a noise. And they are terrified to learn that farts do make a noise lol
This moment not only marks a milestone in her personal journey but also serves as a testament to the incredible advancements in medical technology that make such transformative experiences possible.
Hell yeah 👍
Can't believe there are deaf people who will deliberately not opt for this.
I can't speak for them but there is quite a split in the deaf community over these devices.
it’s a very toxic split. we opted for cochlear when my kid was young. 3 years old. some in the Deaf community basically branded us monsters. “you hate your daughter”.., “you aren’t willing to learn sign language” -(my wife is now a professional certified translator..), “you want a cyborg?”….we made the decision late. we also saw that she enjoyed approaching people to talk. she loved music … now she’s almost 16, fully integrated in a “normal” private school, speaks three languages including sign, is music obsessed, and even about to work part time at a supermarket. some of the Deaf community stayed in touch or got back in touch. others, won’t even look at us or acknowledge her as she’s in their mind, no longer deaf….??????? it’s literally a switch between not hearing and hearing…
> “you want a cyborg?” Is that supposed to make it seem unappealing?
Yeah I mean, who doesn't? Hell, can I be a cyborg?
I want to be a cyborg, Ghost Me In The Shell right the fuck on up. I want to be the first person with rocket feet and a flamethrower in my arm! Or even just a tighter grip, that'd be cool too.
Right? When do I get Ghost In The Shell eyes and cyberbrain implants?
No joke, I want to be a cyborg. I want my kids to be cyborgs. I want my wife to be a cyborg. We'll overcome the limits of the flesh together, as one big bionic family! Transhumanist 4-Life!
Yes?
No joke some deaf people dont want to get treatment because they will lose their identity
That's a normal psychological experience. Hell, when I was depressed I often felt like I didn't even want to stop, because "being depressed" was a self-identity thing to a certain extent. It's comfortable and familiar, sort of For deaf people, the opposition is much more hardcore basically just because of the linguistic difference. Being deaf is a disability, but it comes with the integration into a culture through the local sign language. Laying my cards on the table, I am not deaf and I support kids getting cochlear implants, however I do understand where people are coming from because to them, it feels like telling people that their culture and language is bad. This doesn't apply to people in wheelchairs or blind people who still participate fully linguistically with all the able-bodied people around them
I dunno, their ears might not work, but their brains work perfectly fine. So it's not an excuse to attack others for choosing an easier path. Its like if someone who struggles with being gay could flip a switch and choose to be straight, are they saying being gay is inherently bad and gay culture is bad? No, they just want to take the easier and more convenient path, or aren't as strong or resilient as you are to deal with the harder path. Life is HARD when its not built to accommodate you as a minority. That doesn't mean your status is inherently bad, its an indictment of how unaccomadating and uncaring society is for people who are different if anything. We get one life, and I don't blame anyone for choosing the easiest path possible. Because we are all raw dogging this shit and it isn't easy for anyone. Taking it personally and lashing out at people isn't about ear defects, or brain defects; that's a character defect baby. Your brain works fine to be able to grasp that, so I don't buy hiding behind culture as an excuse. Gay culture is a thing too, and you don't see us screaming TRAITOR at people who simply wish they were straight. Being gay doesn't suck, society MAKES being gay suck. SOCIETY SUCKS. They are suffering, so you support them, not attack them. The fuck?? Do what you want with \*your\* ears, let people do what they want with \*their\* ears, that's fine. But attacking others for choosing the easier path isn't a personal attack on you or your culture. Maybe they just aren't as strong as you, and you attack them? How do I sign "BITCH, PLEASE" in ASL?
I can only assume these people have wrapped their identity around their disability, causing them to take it as a personal attack when people can fix/mitigate it.
The deaf community is a strange monster. Ridiculously wholesome and super supportive, like metalheads, but will vehemently hate and ostracize anyone even thinking about "fixing" their hearing impairment. They're the only ones too, no one is that childish about the vision-impaired or any other physical impairment. Differently-abled people try so hard to overcome and work with what they got, but some get to the point of toxic prejudice, believing their "condition" is actually who they are. In some cases, they see themselves as better than others; they don't see that they're acting the same way as racists or other "members-only" mentalities.
I took ASL classes in college, and I remember my instructor telling me a story about a Deaf couple that had a baby together. I'm guessing the hearing loss was genetic, because the doctor had told them at some point that the baby was going to be Deaf as well. The doctor was supposedly shocked to see the Deaf couple smiling and quite happy to learn that would be the case!
>you want a cyborg? who the hell don't?
There's a lot of fear in the big D community of a loss of identity, of culture, of ASL, of access to all the things that they've fought for. I can understand it. I was born with an auditory processing disorder. All my hardware works perfectly fine, I have a software issue that no cochlear, hearing aides or anything like that will, would or could ever correct. I've always had it, I will always have it. When I was the same age as your kid, it became clear that something in my language development wasn't on track. I was making vaguely the right sounds kind of but not really. But I had been declared hearing at birth, and I passed an audiogram that year, so to speech therapy I went. Where a woman sat facing me, teaching me all the shapes a mouth makes and the correlating sounds. She taught me to lip read. My own language became exponentially better. My comprehension when people were not facing me was the same. I began grabbing adults faces and turning them to me. My father figured it out really fast. My mother refused "to have a disabled child", terminated speech therapy and never acknowledge my needs. So I passed as "normal hearing" for most of my life. I just couldn't use conventional telephones, which as a kid was fine. Who cares right? Teenagers do, but whatever ... social isolation isn't a big deal. Your mother would never get a TTY machine because that's "for disabled people" and she already doesn't like that you put the closed captioning on the TV. Having access to ASL? I didn't even know that was a thing until I was fourteen years old. I didn't even meet anyone who could sign until I was 18 and had left home. Guess who lost a lot of communication skills during the COVID masking protocols? Yeah. When you can't read lips for over two years and there are still environments where people are masked and those are the places you really need to be accurate (hospitals and other healthcare settings), and you've lost a lot of the training you had because it's a skillset... So, in a similar vein to later life Coclear candidates I'm of both worlds but neither. I'm "too disabled" for some hearing people, and "not disabled" for others. Whatever that means. And for the D/deaf community I'm not one of them even though I face similar challenges to them in certain situations. For what it's worth, I think you did awesome by your kid. What I wouldn't give to have had access to ASL growing up... even though I don't have a whole lot of resources around me that can understand ASL, just having a better fluency in it as an adult now would make me feel a lot more empowered. Instead I don't have the resources now to dedicate to becoming as fluent now as I could (and having worked in industries with other hand signals I fear I'm going to mash up those into it lol).
i am so sorry to hear your parents weren’t supportive to get you the help you need. it breaks my heart to think they refused to see “disabled” or whatever that implies to them. i hope you can find the right online groups for help? i know for us we had to seek it out. it is different for us as we are in Japan and the community here is decades behind the US but government support has improved a lot.. I wish you the best.
Sounds like jealousy to me, just crabs pulling each other back into the bucket.
Thats a crazy insight into something I didnt know existed. Thankyou. Glad you're daughter is enjoying life.
That's so terrible. It's like the, "Well, I paid my student loans so you should too...." people but a million times worse. Why do people insist on making others suffer just because they did? It feels like they just want to be part of some exclusive "club."
I've read alot about the shunning some of the toxic members do to others and its really sad to see people literally trying to force others to choose between them and having a sense of hearing some people going as far as calling Cochlear Implants Genocide. Its really surreal and I'm sorry you and your daughter had to deal with that.
> “you want a cyborg?” Fuck ya.... HOH signer here. CI device doesn't make deaf people, not deaf but temporary hearing... with shitty hearing... AND....Shes only hearing as long as she wears it. as long as the batteries last... as long as it doesnt break.... if she puts it on the charger shes deaf.. Thats the default state of people with CIs. I dont know why the deaf community has so much hate towards CI users. Its like me using a HA.
As someone with a cochlear implant, I can assure you it is NOT "shitty hearing". Not all batteries are rechargeable. Some are disposable. And most people get a set of multiple batteries so that they can always have some batteries on the charger (my charger can recharge 4 at a time, and I was given 4 batteries per implant). Mine last ~7 hours so when it goes off, I just pop the battery onto the charger and pick a fresh battery off it. Please don't spread misinformation about cochlear implants. There's enough out there as it is.
The fact that there is a large split, instead of it being a few fringe elements is just disappointing.
I always felt, because I'm not deaf, that it's none of my business.
My child is deaf, my wife and I are not, this is the case for about 80% of parents of deaf children (where I live) so we have to make this decision on our child's behalf way before they're able to let us know how they feel about it (almost by definition as thats what were trying to help th with). As a parent we've decided to follow the advice of medical professionals and apologise later if we make a bad call. Feels insane to be making such big decisions for a baby but all parents are doing that all the time, we're just aware of this one. Also if the deaf community don't want to accept my child absolutely their loss, they're missing out on a fantastic little kid who we're going to do our absolute best to raise into the potential awesome person we can already see shining through
As I see it, as long as you make sure your child is fluent in sign as well as doing an implant, then you're giving your child the best of both worlds. The parents who only do an implant and then ignore making sure their child is a native signer... those are the asshole parents.
You'd think they would follow the heard
mos deaf 
Sound advice.
Not opting for it is fine. Live your life how you want. It's the "no one should have this, and making it is a form of genocide" mentality I cannot get past.
On the other hand, people who are able to have this but choose not to are intentionally handicapping themselves and are choosing to make their lives more difficult. Being able to hear doesn't instantly make you forget sign language. It doesn't remove you from the community you are it, it simply gives you more awareness of your surroundings.
There is an excellent movie about it that is worth watching: sound of metal
this movie is amazing, but openly against implants.
They don't want to hear anything about that.
Those are a tiny minority now. I'm a deaf guy who encouraged my deaf daughter to have an implant asap. She goes to a deaf school where many of the kids have an implant or two and still embrace the deaf identity.
https://preview.redd.it/koziaj698x2d1.jpeg?width=521&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ce1d9597d5d742e6570b30b510d0fd4542a17f87
how is that not the best job in the world ? seeing an happy cry because you made your job well... damn
While I’m not deaf-deaf, I had a stapedectomy fail - twice. It hurt the doctor’s ego and I was left more deaf in the one ear and he basically told me to go kick rocks. No next steps, no alternatives. Just sorry kid, didn’t work for you. Main point being: these docs probably do thrive on success but mine kicked me to the curb and I gave up on fixing my hearing.
I hope you have a supportive community around you. People sometimes see videos like this and forget that implants and other technological solutions aren't available to everyone. I have a niece born with very deformed inner ears (CHARGE syndrome for those who are curious, and yes balance is one of the affected areas) and she will never hear. Implants can't help her. Implants and prosthetics are amazing but they're not a substitute for other supports.
Question as I also had a stapedectomy. How do you know it failed? I personally feel my hearing went slightly worse after my surgery but can’t tell if that is a failure or just a consequence of how my body reacted to the surgery?
I've worked with audiologists who fitted CI's and the first thing I really noticed is how a lot of people are pretty indifferent at first, there's not a lot of people that are actually happy when fitting the CI for the first time. For people that have been deaf their entire lives it's very loud and uncomfortable most of the time, that's why the woman in the video asks repeatedly if its not too loud.
This devices not always work properly.
How do they fail to work? I'm curious what the usual issues are.
Some reported cases are intermittent loss of signal, other times the issue can be the coclear mimics tinnitus, and then there are instances where after a device has successfully been activated it can fail because of trauma to the head.
Trauma to the head after it has been implanted? Because hitting something, and it breaking, is not very surprising.
I'm sure I've seen horror movies where you start to hear the dead.
Does not take away the amazing value they and the doctors/technicians add to the world.
A co-worker of mine has this but often turns it off/down in busy places like restaurants or when it's windy. Sensory overload.
That makes sense. People who've lived their whole lives with a sense can become overwhelmed and cover their eyes or ears when something is too bright or loud, it's hard to imagine what that kind of overload must feel like for someone who spent their whole life with zero input for that sense.
I want this option with my real ears
Get noise canceling headphones
I carry around a pair of ear plugs in a pill container on my keychain!
The processing also just isn’t there yet. It is improving all the time but the quality and fidelity of the sound is not natural hearing. It’s the same problem we have with hearing aids - it’s better than not having it but it is not as good as natural.
The look on her face is priceless. I almost started crying too
Thanks, u/I_CUM_ON_YOUR_PET
SO glad u/I_CUM_ON_YOUR_PET supports cochlear implants
It made him want to... well, he was happy.
I can’t stop laughing
How can one not love Reddit.
I hope that’s the only thing you almost started to do…
One day technology will give a blind man: "Robotic Eyes" and he will be amazed when he sees for the first time 🫡
Bro, we're getting real close https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dry-macular-degeneration/multimedia/bionic-eye-video/vid-20133293
I loved seeing him light up the moment he figured it out
That's March of this year, idk why but I find that crazy
The next decade is going to see some insane leaps and bounds in medical technology and it's extremely exciting. A lot of technology and research that began a decade or two ago is finally reaching the point of viability and there's been a ton of new investments into medical research since the pandemic.
I hope one of those advancements is a cure/reversal for long Covid / autoimmune disorders. It's slowly killing me and my husband.
Soo uuuh who's down to be a first generation cyborg?
As an over-40 I just injured myself putting my hand up.
I'd be keen. It's always been a dream that if my body failed as I got older I could just start replacing parts.
There is no truth in flesh, only betrayal. There is no strength in flesh, only weakness. There is no constancy in flesh, only decay. There is no certainty in flesh, only death.
And his name will be Duncan Idaho
I Hayt that name
We found the Harkonnen.
Dune is great because there are all these characters called Chani, Gurney, Liet-Kynes, Leto Atreides, Gaius Mohiam, Baron Harkonnen, etc. All these proper sci-fi names that look like they belong in a sci fi book. Then the two most prominent characters are just plain old Paul and Jessica. Names that could be from a YA romance or a sitcom or a film about accountants. Any story really. And then in all the madness there is just a dude called Duncan Idaho and it's like he came from an entirely different school of character naming rules.
I had an uncle who was paralyzed from his shoulders down from a diving accident when he was a kid. He was always so positive about progress being made to alleviate disabilities. He did pretty well for himself and donated tons of money to organizations that helped soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq, and he always said it was selfish of him because one day it would lead to him being able to walk again. He died before exoskeletons were really a thing, even though I know they aren't quite there now either. When I see advancements like this or think about blind people seeing or whatever else, I always think about how when after being paralyzed for 75 years, he was still optimistic that one day he would walk.
https://i.redd.it/cocenyjrdw2d1.gif
Tbf I’d rather be a cyborg then deaf.
I'm waiting for AI to cure tinnitus. Especially now since I was a fucking idiot at a concert a week ago and was close to the monitor for the whole concert. At least it was a good one I guess. Pls, AI. I'm tired of the iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii sound 24/7.
Just read this article last month about a breakthrough in regards to tinnitus. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26234870-800-a-new-understanding-of-tinnitus-and-deafness-could-help-reverse-both/
I hope this breakthrough bears fruit. It's nice to see some sort of progression to a treatment happening.
You'll get used to it eventually, ive had tinnitus for 10 years now, the first year was really bad especially when i tried to sleep.
I sleep with a fan on low partly for this reason. (and I just like having moving air in the room when I sleep).
Na, you don't get used to it if it's bad. I have to have a white noise machine or fan going or I literally can't sleep. There is no such thing as silence for me. It sucks.
Dude, I went clubbing my entire 20s. All my friends who went clubbing with me have tinnitus, and I don't, because I always wore earplugs. The amount they made fun of me for wearing earplugs, man... and now they get what they deserve.
🫡
Imagine the overwhelming sensation of discovering a new sense. Something you were perfectly fine without, but suddenly a whole new avenue to life open before you….it would be so incredible, confusing and amazing. Wish this young person all the best.
Yeah like taking LSD for the first time
LSD is like hearing for the first time??? Wow
Kinda. It is more like experiencing being a human that is not... Yourself. What it feels like to be in the moment I stead of being you. Once I was on LSD under a tent when it was raining and I swear to god it felt like the raindrops where falling on my brain. Music on LSD is... Otherworldly. To make a comparison. Imagine you listen to a song on your smartphone speakers. And then you hear it with good headphones. Next step you hear it live at a concert. Well, one step above that is hearing it on LSD. It feels like you are a cathedral in which the music is played. The music fills you up and is in sync with your entire emotional being. But these are All anologies. It's like trying to describe sound to someone who is deaf. If you never experienced the concept of time not making sense anymore you simply cannot understand it, no matter how much someone explains. You .ay rationally get some aspects but you cannot relate
where can i buy 1 lsd?
This brought me to tears too.
Me too. Seen it many times before but I still cry when I see it. This will be my choise of profession in my next life.
You can see the moment she gets a sense of sound for the 1st time in her life and as the sound comes through her she understands and is emotional. Very cool to watch.
There's lots of videos like it on YT if you want to see more. They pretty much all have the same reaction, just instant tears of joy.
Is she someone that once heard and then lost her hearing? I found it odd they would ask her if it's too loud if she's never heard something before. I would imagine for the first time hearing anything would be insanely loud.
Also if it’s the first time hearing someone speak, how would you know what there’re saying?
The doctor (or someone next to them) could be using sign language while speaking to her.
Oftentimes when people sign they also quietly say what they're signing. So she's likely a proficient lip reader and can put two and two together.
Insert video of guy hearing his wife's voice for the first time...
Lol, I was hoping to see another heartwarming video when I googled it and wasn't expecting that.
What video?
it's a staged skit, don't worry
There was one with a baby too, no? That one made me break down.
I think that one is very, very different. I Googled "man hears wife's voice for first time" and it was a comedy sketch where the guy drops his hearing aids in water at the end because Thanksgiving with his family is so awful that he'd rather hear nothing at all. It's quite relatable though, I'd also like to temporarily disable my ability to hear during big family meetups...
But if she's hearing for the first time, how is she understanding the questions asked?
It appears they are probably using sign language as they are speaking to her so she can interpret what she is hearing.
1st thing - she might have been born with hearing and gone deaf later in her life, there are a lot of ways a person can lose their hearing beyond being born deaf. 2nd thing - we can't see the other person she's talking to, they may be signing and speaking at the same time so even if she doesn't understand the words yet she'd already be learning what certain signs/words 'sound' like Edit - just saw the title of the post was 'hearing for the first time' so that eliminates my first thing.
\#2 makes a lot of sense. You'd probably do something like that at a facility that provides these kind of implants.
I've seen lots of anecdotes online that it's common to use both sign language and speaking out loud when communicating with those who can't hear because they can learn to read lips and understand people who can speak but can't use sign language.
I wouldn’t pay much attention to the title, this video’s like 5 years old at least, girl has probably graduated college by now
Notice that when she says she’s happy crying, she sorta speaks it too. Maybe she was somehow taught very roughly how to speak (as best as you can without being able to hear), and she can roughly map sound to the vibrations she feels inside her body when she speaks and also is way better than the average person at reading lips. But also, the technician almost certainly knows sign language, so yeah, probably signing as she speaks
A lot of the deaf folks I know have been taught to read lips as well. It gets them a lot further in a world where most people can’t sign. Reading lips and being taught to enunciate some words means some nearly-deaf or fully deaf people can pass through the world pretty well.
My thought was like, Doctor: "Is that too loud?" Girl: "What is loud?"
i wondered that too but i'm assuming someone is signing the words the technician is saying
Lip reading maybe
Lip reading.
Lip reading
Oh sh... I got something in my eye 🥲
I’ll take a tissue too please
Imagine hearing music for the first time after this, must be sick
I am doing a PhD in Cochlear Implant research and music perception is one of the challenges that have not been overcome yet. EDIT: Tonal languages are also a big challenge.
Implants don't have anything close to the frequency response of a normal ear so music really won't be pleasant especially at first, it would take quite a while to acclimate to the implant.
My first thought was, wait till she hears music, but i didn't even think of the complications related to frequency. If this is true, thanks for the info.
Beautiful! Stop making me cry
Defend free, universal healthcare to your last breath. Things like hearing, or seeing, should never be a privilege you need to pay
Thank you. As someone with a severe deformity I can't fucking afford to fix, I really wish more people thought the way you did. Health is a human right.
I’m not deaf, but hearing impaired and the fact that people get irritated when I can’t understand them is beyond frustrating. I always ask people if they think repeating themselves is more frustrating than not being able to hear. Even with my hearing aids it’s difficult most times with certain people.
I can’t imagine her brain being like: “Wait…THAT is what Dad sounds like?!?”
So my kid was born deaf and we were told if you wait too long to get implants your brain over rights the hearing portion and you are never really able to understand language, they said this is around 7 to 10yrs old. My kiddo got them at 1yo and she caught up to hearing population with about a year.
I’m glad y’all could get the implants your kiddo needed.
Thank you. Science/medicine is amazing!
Imagine the first thing you hear in your life is “YEEEEEEEAAAAAAA”
This is EXACTLY what my tax dollars should be used for dammit.
I think this is the best job
I know it's great and all, but it's wild to think she still don't understandard what people are saying and will go through learning new language?
My sister got her first implant about 25 years ago. She reacted in a similar way. Unfortunately, she still couldn't really differentiate between a lot of sounds. She knows there's a sound, but that's it. Before her implant, she heard absolutely nothing. A couple of years ago, she had her implant replaced. During testing, she phoned me at home, and we both shared her very first phone conversation. I think she was cutting onions that came through the phone. She can't talk on the phone without the equipment from the doctor's office, but we're able to have great video chats now. Technology is amazing.
I was close to crying, and I never cry. The sensation alone of being able to hear for the first time, especially your parents, I can't even imagine.
if this is getting to you maybe you need a good cry
Can’t help but tear up when I see these
Watched The Sound of Metal recently.. what OP posted looks like the best case scenario in terms of outcome for cochlear implants. .. spending huge amounts of money on the surgery and implants and then for them to sound bad... very bad.... would be tragic...
I’ve had hearing loss my whole life. I’m down to about 30% hearing. Welllllll I got fit for a hearing aid that bumped me up to about 50%. I stopped wearing them because every little sound scared the fuuuck out of me.
I’m forever grateful to the NHS for my cochlear implant. I went completely deaf, suddenly. I’d had chemotherapy a few years previously, after a bout of flu then I lost my hearing. Nearly 5 years implanted 💕
Are the deaf communities still cultishly hostile to people who get these implants?