Some definite highlights:

Lori and I were walking to some friends house for breakfast. Up on the telephone wires some birds were declaring their happiness in living in such a beautiful town as Ferndale, especially on such a fine morning as it was. Lori was able to hear the birds and I rejoiced. This had a lot of meaning for me because on her gradual trip to deafness, one day that stands out among the others was another walk. This time we were walking alone up Williams Creek Road. I had brought a note pad along because this was before she got her hearing aids. I realized that if she couldn’t hear me, then she couldn’t hear the birds, and it hit me hard how much pleasure had gone out of her life. But now the birds are singing again, as they should be.

Another thrill was the moment Ricky climbed up on the back of the futon right by her head and she recognized that Ricky was purring. That’s one sound I know Lori really missed. But now the cats are purring again, as they should be.

We watched a couple of episodes of Fawlty Towers the other night. Since we were streaming them from Netflix, there weren’t subtitles, but Lori was able to get most of the dialogue. Which given that the actors all speak with English accents (or in one case Spanish), that’s pretty good. But now John Cleese is funny again, as he should be.

Best of all, we were watching a movie a couple of nights ago, and it did have subtitles so we turned them on. But what was so wonderful was that I could talk to Lori and make comments about the movie. Aside from not having your feet glued to the floor in a theater, isn’t being able to talk during a movie one of the things that makes home theater so great? I really missed being able to make witty remarks and enjoy Lori’s laughter. But now hopefully I’m funny again, and I guess that’s as it should be too.

In the last two weeks Lori and I have been explaining this amazing technology to lots of friends. So I decided to do a bit of show and tell today. If anyone has kids in school that would like to bring in the real bionic woman, I’m sure Lori would be cool with that now.

Lori wearing her cochlear implants

Initially, when I showed Lori the info on cochlear implants, she was pretty disgusted with the idea of wearing something stuck to her head. I tried to explain to her that these days people are going around with all kinds of bluetooth devices stuck to their heads, and that people would barely even notice it. Then we went to a picnic for people considering getting the devices and they put pink dots on the nametags of those that already had them, because most of the women were able to hide them. With the way she normally wears her hair, the coil and the processor are barely seen.

Med-El Speech Processor

If Lori wears her hair back, then you can see them, and this is what you’d see. The circular disc is the coil. This has a magnet in it, surrounded by a coil. The magnet sticks to the implant. The implant sits under her skin, and it has a probe with electrodes that was inserted into her cochlea. The electrodes directly stimulate the auditory nerves. The coil transmits both the power and signal to the implant through radio waves. The implant has no battery power of its own.

The part that rests on her ear is the processor. It has microphone and takes the sound input, does a bunch of processing depending on the program and maps loaded into it, and then sends the resulting digital signal to the coil. Lori can choose from 4 different programs. When she visits Stanford, they load the programs by connecting the processor to a PC. Yep, Lori’s hearing is being controlled by a Windows program. Let’s hope she doesn’t pick up a virus. (True to form, during her last visit, the computer had to be rebooted.)

Ears to go

As I mentioned earlier, each implant comes with a complete backup and some nifty accessories. Here’s the James Bond case they ship everything in. Since she got two implants she got two cases, but I was able to consolidate it enough to get everything into one, which will make traveling a lot less conspicuous.

Accessories

Open the case and here’s some on what you’ll see. On the left is the remote control. The remote can be used to chang the volume, sensitivity, and the program for the left and/or right ear. There’s also a few other buttons that will perform something in the future but the audiologist didn’t mention what that was yet. Very James Bondish. The cool thing is that since Lori got two kits, one for each ear, there’s an extra remote. I’m envisioning all kinds of practical jokes based on this spare remote. I’m also thinking that most men would love to have a remote that silenced their wives from time to time, but that’s a different subject.

To the right of the implant are the accessory covers, in six different fashionable hues so that when Lori gets tired of sienna, she can change to blue or red, or to match the sky in Ferndale, grey.

The cable plugs into the bottom of the processor and can then be plugged into a battery powered sound source like an iPod, iPhone, or an FM transceiver, such as movie theaters use for the hearing impaired. Med-El currently has two cables available, this one doesn’t cut out the ambient sound so she can listen to her music on her iPhone at work and still hear people talking to her. In one of the books we read, the author felt very funny carrying around a Walkman (written before the iPod obviously) and not wearing a pair of headphones to go with it. 

The good news is that Lori is already finding some music that she enjoys. Not that it sounds anything close to hi-fi, and it never will, but the fact that she’s even finding it tolerable is great at this early stage of the re-learning process. So music is making her happy again, and that’s the way it should be.

Today was Lori’s activation day. After spending the last 19 days in total silence, the big day finally came and she got to see how the new implants worked. 

We got to Stanford at 11:00 and Lori’s sister met us there a few minutes later. About 11:30 we finally met with Dr. Blevin, the wonderfully talented surgeon who implanted the two devices at her last visit. He took a look at both ears and said everything was healing as expected and cleared her for the next step, the audiologist.

We had time for lunch in between appointments so we headed to the cafeteria. Who said hospital food sucked? I had a great cardiac burger (bacon cheeseburger) with curly fries, but I figured with all the doctors in the house I’d be safe should the worst happen.

After lunch we went to meet the audiologist. She first showed us the four boxes of equipment that was Lori’s new ears. Two of these boxes looked like they could have held well packed laptops. I was thinking either the processors were a lot bigger than they let on, or Med-El seriously over packed the devices. Fortunately, it turned out to be the latter.

Inside each of the two big boxes was a kit for each ear. Everything in the kit was packed in a very slick looking aluminum briefcase that had us all thinking it looked very James Bondish. Inside the briefcase they packed two of everything you need, so that you have a backup for anything that fails. That’s very comforting as redundancy is a good thing to have for mission critical components in any system. As we found out in the last few weeks, hearing definitely is on the mission critical list.

Once Dr. Loy got everything unpacked she started on Lori’s left ear. First she programmed the 12 channels for the quietest sound Lori could hear, then the loudest that was comfortable for her. Then came the big moment, Dr. Loy loaded the map into her processor, and turned it on and spoke to Lori. Lori was surprised that she was instantly able to understand Dr. Loy. Paula was surprised too, which left me wondering why I was the only optimist of the group. After all, I’m an official member of the Grump & Gripe Club.

The process was repeated for the right ear, and just in that short time her hearing improved. It was quickly obvious that her hearing was already back to the level she was at before the surgery when she was relying on her hearing aids. It was very comforting to know that she wasn’t any worse off, and knowing that patients improve dramatically after even just a few days of using the implants we were very encouraged.

It is also obvious that for the next few weeks I will be explaining all these new sounds to Lori. While the implants have returned her hearing, it’s not the hearing that you and I experience, or even the hearing she had with her hearing aids.

When we got back to mom’s house, Paula sang to Lori, and she was able to enjoy it to the point it brought tears to her eyes. That’s the first time Lori has enjoyed music for awhile. She then asked me to sit down at the piano, and that brought tears to her eyes as well. (I wish I were really that good of a piano player.) That she’s enjoying any music this early in the process is amazing, and it’s a good sign that Lori is going to be one of the lucky ones that will get the most out of her implants.

It’s really hard to express just how we both feel right now. I knew this was going to be a momentous day for both of us, but to have the gift of communication restored to us is overwhelming. I thought I was coping ok during the last 19 days, but being able to talk to her again feels like a rebirth. Lori is completely in awe that they are working so well right off and that she’s once again enjoying things that had disappeared from her life. 

I remember as a kid the excitement of opening boxes and boxes of presents on Christmas morning. But none of the presents I received as a kid compare to the present that came to us in all those Med-El boxes today. The gift of communication.

Lori started out code orange, which meant she was in the building. A few minutes later she went code yellow, indicating that she was in pre-op. This is where I was supposed to get a chance to see her before the surgery, but the nurse brought her purse out and that was it.

Shortly after 7:30am she went to code green, indicating that she’s in surgery. This status is expected to remain the same for 5 hours. So right now the board is looking pretty boring. There are already other patients who have gone on to red for closing, blue for the recovery room phase 1, purple for the recovery room phase 2, and even grey for discharged.

Here is where my logical mind has a problem with their use of colors. Their use of the yellow, green and red stages sort of make sense if you think of them in the traffic signal sense. But when you throw in the other 6 colors it becomes harder to see the relationship. I would have designed it so that it went in the order of the spectrum starting with purple and ending with red.

You can probably tell that I’m pretty bored at this point.

It did make me realize how lucky I am though. Even though the last couple of years have been a real trial for Lori and I, they are problems that we are working through, and in time we hope we regain some sense of normalcy. As I write this at 9:28pm, we are about 8 hours away from starting the process that will turn mild, docile Lori, into a true bionic woman.

No, she won’t be able to out run freight trains, or lift cars off of people, but early tomorrow morning we will be making our way back to Stanford Hospital, where surgeons will install her two cochlear implants. What a bad little gene took away, modern science will return.

It won’t be instantaneous, and it won’t be back to normal, but I’m looking forward to Lori’s return to the hearing world. I sure thank the scientists who not only dreamed of such a device, but all the researchers and programmers who continually strive to improve their effectiveness.