Cochlear Implant Experiences

It's good to hear from you, Tom and I will share some of my experiences. I am 83 years old and had my CI implant done on March 8, 2022. I have had no regrets and yes, it is a learning curve for all of us. I have always had Phonak hearing aids and my hearing loss was less than 33% in both ears. I chose to have the right ear get the CI as I sleep on my left side (something to think about). I have a Phonak hearing aid in the left ear. I have done all the homework and everything the audiologist has assigned to me. I work with an app and try to spend 30 minutes each day using that.

What you said about noisy environments is something many had discussed here. I find it very difficult in noisy restaurants or rooms with many people talking. I don't think that is going to improve much. There are some people who I have difficulty hearing also. Men have deeper voices and I hear them much better than wonen who have high pitched voices for instance. I love the Bluetooth while using my cell phone. It's made a great difference in my life. My CI is AB Bionics which is compatible with Phonak hearing aids.

I find forums such as these very helpful with many good ideas.

As a side note:
My CI box was lost while traveling over Thanksgiving! It was eventually found in my granddaughter's bedroom where I was staying. It slipped out of my suitcase onto the floor behind some stuff. I have now purchased an Apple Air Tag and keep it in my CI box!

Welcome to the hearing loss forum on Mayo Clinic Connect. You've come to a good place to get firsthand information based on personal experiences. Those experiences will vary, but I'm pretty sure you'll find the positive far outweighs the negative.

Everyone is different when it comes to learning to hear with a CI. However, as the technology has progressed, it seems that more and more people are having very positive experiences with less time for adjustment. Some being able to retain some residual hearing. That wasn't possible when I was implanted in 2005.

My hearing loss specs were similar to yours when I was declared a CI candidate. I was in my 60s. I'm so glad I decided to go for it! The best piece of advice I received pre implant, was to use my hearing aid's telecoils with a neckloop to listen to audiobooks. I did that for several months prior to the CI surgery. The telecoils allowed me to get the sound directly into my hearing aids without any background noise. The theory was that there was some auditory deprivation due to not hearing well for years, and I needed to teach my ears how to listen. That practice must have made sense because when my CI was activated, I understood speech in quiet immediately. It took a bit of time to be able to start to filter some of the background noise. Yes, voices sounded different, but it didn't take more than a few months for me to adapt to this new way of hearing. Everything sounds 'normal' now, and I'm able to recognize voices and enjoy music. I have remained bimodal, using both a CI and a hearing aid.

My tests with both the CI and the HA show my word recognition is in the mid 90th percentile. It was in the 30th percentile pre CI.

I am currently using the Cochlear N6 processor, and hope to upgrade to the N8 in a few months. Cochlear's products, for me, have been excellent.

It's not perfect, but with the mini mic 2+ in noisy social settings, I am able to do quite well. I look forward to my next CI adventure when I upgrade. It keeps getting better all the time! Good luck to you. Keep asking questions. There is information at: http://www.hearingloss.org and also at https://www.acialliance.org/ that you may find helpful.

Thank you for these postings. I apologize to those who responded to my note for my tardy reconnecting. These are quite helpful.

This is hard for me to evaluate. My wise daughter suggested i make a list of what I'd hope would improve after a CI, and whether those are realistic expectations. One is hearing better in noise. Given the the CI also uses noise suppression algorithms and your comments (and others), I'm not sure I will get a lot of improvement in hearing in noisy situations. Is that the view of others here?

My word recognition scores are likely to improve, just how much is hard for anyone to predict. An audiologist at Mayo suggested I'd likely go from 35% to perhaps 60% and I've others say as in the previous posting, that they've seen recognition scores go as high at 90%. Certainly if these scores improve significantly, I would expect that would help in all situations.

I was scheduled to have the surgery in April, but decided to push that back until I was more comfortable this was the right path. At the suggestion of my long time audiologist (I've moved but stay in touch), I'm trying the most recent generation Phonak and ReSound aids to see to what degree they help.

I'm 75 now, and my hearing loss has also been around 30 years or so. I now have bi-lateral CIs. I got my first implant 15 years ago and the second just last year. The difference is profound and mazing, but not free. Your brain doesn't completely recognize the new information sent by the implant, so you have to sort of re-learn how to hear. It took me a couple weeks to be able to get basics (anbient noise like the dog barking and familiar voices like my family). Fortunately, my brother also has CIs and had had them for years, so he could coach me thru the beginnings. I learned that the brain is amazing, my hearing just kept getting better and better. Today, my speech recognition in the longer-implanted ear is 92%, in the newer ear 64%. I think this experience is unusual, but I now know lots of people with implants, and everyone had the same experience with gradual imrovement.
It's very scary to face a surgery that's irreversible. I need cataract surgery and have stalled for years. Just can't face it, or at least not so far. Good luck with your decision.

Tom I am 83 and am at about the same stage of hearing to you although my worst ear word recognition is in the 40%s.
I have had my Phonak Audeo hearing aids for over 3 years now and am wondering how you are doing with your new up to date ones. I likely am a candidate for a C1 but have the same reasons for hesitation as you but hate to spend the $$$ needed for the new aids if I have reached the limit of what hearing aids can do.

Appreciate your input and want to get your impression of how the sound changes. I hear the "your brain needs to relearn" the new sound. What does it sound like and how does it differ? How well do you hear in noisy settings?

As for your fear of cataract surgery, I also am 75 and had it 10 years ago. Unlike CI, this is near perfect correction to normal natural vision and among the safest surgery there is.

Thanks for this input. I hadn’t heard of a continuing improvement over a number of years. I’d heard that for most people you should expect to achieve most of the eventual improvement after a year or so. Do you recall what your word recognition was for the first implant after a year?

How do you find the quality of sound bilateral versus bimodal?

Thanks again for the input.

Tom

Hi Barbara

I tried new Phonak aids for about a week. I heard mid-range sounds more than I do with my older Phonak aids, but I’m not sure it changed my overall speech recognition enough to carry me forward. I’m trying to arrange to try ReSound aids as that’s what I’d have if I do the Cochlear implant. These are loaner aids from my local audiologist. I may decide to invest some dollars to order new aids so I can try them for 4-6 weeks.

You should be able to try new aids for $ expense before you expend $$$$ to actually buy them. With my longtime audiologist where I used to live, the investment would have been just the cost of new molds. My current audiologist works in a smaller setting and they charge an additional $500 if you decide to return the aids. I actually don’t think that’s unreasonable given the time she’ll spend with me to set them up and tweak them along the way.

I forgot to mention that I really liked the phone app that I could use to control those new Phonak hearing aids. I still had program control on the aids themselves, but I could make real-time adjustments through the app. For example I was in a fairly noisy restaurant and was able to experiment with increasing and decreasing the level of noise reduction to find a good sweet spot for that particular situation. I liked that level of control that used to be only available via programming by the audiologist. Maybe today all the aids have this.

My memory is that most improvements were within about a year. But it’s also true that over time things sounded more ‘normal’ . Music, for example, seemed to progress toward my memory of it.
I liked bi-modal hearing better than bi-lateral, the sound seemed richer. My second implant also seems to be taking longer than I expected to perform well. That could be because I haven’t put a lot of time in training/rehab activity, or because I’m now retired and it doesn’t get as much social input. And sound quality with an implant doesn’t seem as rich as with an aid.
I guess the sum is that hearing is much more complex than just word recognition. Even with poor recognition, my hearing aid seemed to pick up sound that the implant missed. I suspect that these less quantitative elements are part of the continuous improvement I perceive. Implants have taught me that the brain is a much bigger player in hearing than I first imagined, and brains apparently want to learn.

Thanks. That’s really helpful.