My name is Melissa, I am soon to be 21 years old, I live in Manchester, United Kingdom
I was either born deaf or deafened to medication while in Special Care Baby Unit(SCBU), most of us think it is the latter due to my birth circumstances, born as the 2nd triplet at 28 weeks and 5 days. I received lots of medication, I had many prematurity related illnesses and conditions so the only way to save my life was these medications.
After 13 weeks in hospital, my sister and I came home. The weakest one of the triplet did not survive and passed away at 5 months old.
Mum knew for a long time that there was something wrong with me, after a while she began to realise. At 7 months, with a 7 month old sister and a 3 year old brother in the house and the noise levels that would have occured, she realised that I was deaf. She spoke to my family members and they said I couldn’t have been deaf since I responded to some things, Mum was sure I was feeling vibrations and she was right. At 9 months of age I was diagnosed with severe-profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss and aided at 12 months of age. My road to learning to hear began.
I wore hearing aids for 9 years in my left and still wearing a hearing aid in my right(almost 20 years of hearing aid use) I was implanted with Cochlear, on October 2000 after a year long assessment and testing. Before implantation, unaided I only had a 110-120db amount of hearing, with hearing aids, I was only aided to 50-70db.
Now with my cochlear implant, I hear down to 30db as testing shows but I think I actually hear lower than that. I am ten years post implant and it feels like only yesterday that it happened!! I love to hear with my implant, I talk, I work in a hearing environment with typical hearing children, I pick up conversations behind me which are not aimed at me, I pick up strangers conversations at times and I can understand the children by lipreading and hearing. Although I don’t hear “normally” I can hear mostly everything, music is NOT one of my interests to shock you all…
Feel free to email me at melissascochlearimplant@yahoo.co.uk
Posted by <waves hello> o/ I'm AJW and I'm struggling with my deafness - AllDeaf.com on May 15, 2011 at 9:52 am
[...] round the world as well). It has been suggested by my ENT consultant to explore the CI option, so your story and blog was interesting to read. It's important that I gather as much information as possible to work out [...]