I was 45 with a good job, a wife and two teenage children when I lost my hearing. I was on a business trip to Northern Ireland, felt as if I was coming down with flu and went back to my hotel early to go to bed. I woke up 3 days later in an isolation ward in intensive care, the flu turned out to be meningitis and mine and my families life changed forever. I went from having full hearing to zero hearing literally overnight and the icing on the cake was that my balance organs were also extensively destroyed so I was unable to stand or walk without assistance.
When I returned home life was horrendous I relied on my wife and children for everything and went through all the anger, guilt, helpless etc. etc. stages becoming quite depressed. I had no lip-reading skills and had never heard of finger spelling so everything had to be written down for me and although I could talk I couldn’t hear myself, and without that feedback, would shout at people or speak so quietly that I couldn’t be heard.
My GP at the time had no experience of sudden hearing loss and was extremely deaf unaware. Despite the consultant in Northern Ireland telling us that my only option was a cochlear implant my GP insisted that my hearing may return and refused to even refer me to Audiology for three months. When we did finally get an appointment they confirmed that the only way I was going to hear anything again would be an implant. In my own mind I didn’t have to even think about the decision and weigh up the pro’s and con’s – if that was going to allow me to hear again then that’s what I needed. The consultant explained that one of the problems with meningitis was that the cochlear often ossified very quickly and that early implantation was necessary to overcome this, but the catch 22 was that that the funding for adult implants in our Health Authority was such that the waiting list was 3, 4 or even 5 years. I did however have an operation very quickly after this but it wasn’t a full implantation but only the insertion of a stent to keep a pathway open for the future insertion of a working electrode.
There was no way we could cope with being deaf for years and years so we started a campaign to do what we could to shorten this period. I couldn’t communicate well so most of the work fell to my wife Karen. We wrote to and spoke to everyone we could think of to influence this decision, The Chairman of our Health Authority, our MP, the Minister for Health, the Consultant, our GP, newspapers etc and generally made a nuisances of our selves. It paid off and I received an implant within a year.
The effect was dramatic. Immediately it was switched on I could understand what people were saying. Ok it sounded a bit strange to start with but I could communicate again. I gradually learnt to understand more and more. I’m now independent again and can converse one to one effectively. I can’t use the phone, make much sense of music and still rely on subtitles on TV but who knows what the next upgrade will bring.