Illustration by Drew Shannon
First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
When I began to lose my hearing as I approached 50, sounds left me gradually, like characters exiting one at a time from the stage. Within a few years I couldn’t hear the music of robins singing in springtime or the chirp of crickets on a summer evening. I too was once a singer, but I stopped singing when I could no longer hear myself.
In his novel Deaf Sentence, British author David Lodge writes that as opposed to blindness, which he calls “a tragic infirmity,” deafness is “a comic infirmity.” Many of us who’ve lived with hearing loss have a repertoire of funny stories about our own aural pratfalls – the misunderstood words, the non-sequitur comments on a dead topic, an apparent cluelessness about what’s going on – joining in the laughter that we don’t quite catch.
But being hard of hearing is not a joke. It can be isolating, frustrating, embarrassing. When a server in a restaurant asks me something, I automatically look to the person I’m with for clarification, as if I were in a country where I don’t speak the language. I’ve missed instructions over the phone because I was too embarrassed to ask the caller to repeat themselves. I’ve faked my way through receptions or lunch dates, nodding and smiling through the burbling mire of noise, pretending I could follow what was being said.
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At the audiologist’s office I regularly take a test that hearing-loss people are familiar with, where you sit in a booth wearing headphones and play a game of Simon Says – but with words, not actions. A voice says, “Say the word fetch.” And you say what you hear, which may or may not be fetch. In my case it often isn’t.
The plotlines on my audiogram printout make me think of black diamond ski slopes, starting down slowly and then suddenly plunging almost vertically to the bottom of the graph. What this shows is that I have only mild hearing loss at lower frequencies – below about 500 hertz – but above that number I might as well have my head immersed in a bowl of lentil soup. You’d think 500 hertz would be a decent place to stop listening to things; many useful sounds exist below that level, including basic human speech. So what’s the problem?
Well for one thing, the unvoiced consonants we utter when we speak (ch, f, k, p, s, sh, t, th) resonate at a much higher frequency than that, higher than I can hear. To me, fetch sounds just like chest. My verbal comprehension sinks downward like those graph lines.
For the record, I’m not profoundly deaf, but as my world grew more muffled and indistinct, my hearing aids were struggling to help me. What began as an inconvenience became a disability.
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My audiologist suggested that my audiogram scores could qualify my right ear for a cochlear implant – a device that takes over the function of the inner-ear organ called the cochlea. The cochlear implant intercepts sounds from the air, converts them to electronic signals and sends them to my brain via an array of electrodes. A friend put it well: “Think of a cochlear implant,” she said, “as a hip replacement for your ear.” It’s a good analogy. The implant is not a repair to the body’s natural hearing mechanism; it’s a replacement.
At first this sounded like nothing I would be interested in. I disliked wearing my hearing aids as it was; the new device looked clunkier and heavier. I’m gonna need a bigger ear, I thought.
But I also knew I was not going to go gently into the growing silence. In fall 2024 after a summer of tests and interviews, I was accepted into the Cochlear Implant Program at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto.
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A cochlear implant has two pieces. In December I was surgically implanted with the part that lives inside my head, including the electrode array. Four weeks later I got the outside part: microphones, a speech processor and a transmitter that sends the signal to the implant. The two pieces – inside and outside – are held to each other by a magnet.
When it was first activated, the device delivered a jarring cowbell-like sound when people spoke, and the letter s sounded like a hi-hat cymbal. But it was making a sound. I hadn’t heard an s or a t for a dozen years. Over time there was less cowbell.
I now have a cochlear implant in one ear and a hearing aid in the other, a setup that’s called bimodal. The synergy of these two devices has revolutionized my hearing, which is now stronger, sharper and clearer. It’s not perfect yet: My success with the new device will be linked to the effort I devote to teaching myself to recognize the digital signals it is sending me.
It’ll be worth it. This spring I’ve been able to hear the robins for the first time in decades. They sound a little tinny and electronic, but they’re there, along with a whole lot of other sounds that I thought were gone forever. I may join the birds and sing again.
Christopher Cameron lives in Northumberland County, Ont.