The following story is one person's experience with a cochlear implant. Your experience may be very different. Success with a cochlear implant is influenced by many factors including how long a person has had hearing loss, the age a person receives an implant, medical and anatomical factors and more. Please consult your cochlear implant professional and/or the Bionic Ear Association with questions.

Hearing aids didn’t help, but the cochlear implant will, Luke’s dad is convinced.  Luke D. of Rancho Cucamonga, California, received his cochlear implant—the HiResolution^® Bionic Ear System from Advanced Bionics—in mid-2006 when he was three years old. Here is what his father, Jim, an electronics engineer, says about Luke’s journey to sound. “We first welcomed Luke into our home as his foster parents when he was a baby. He was two when we adopted him, but we knew from the time he was six months that he couldn’t hear.” “At first, we tried to help Luke by fitting him with top-of-the-line, highest-powered hearing aids. He wore them on and off for the next year—mostly off because he so often came down with ear infections. As a result, they didn’t do him much good. With Luke’s developmental progress being more and more delayed, we decided to talk to his doctor about the option of a cochlear implant.” “When they said Luke was an appropriate candidate for it, we contacted the various makers of cochlear implants to learn all that we could about the devices. We were particularly impressed with Advanced Bionics for a number of reasons. For instance, one of their staff audiologists spent two hours with us on the phone, answering our questions in thorough detail. They also gave us a tour of their manufacturing facility. Because of the work I do, I’ve been in a lot of aerospace and defense industry plants where it’s essential that the quality controls be absolutely the highest possible—I saw those same kind of quality controls at the Advanced Bionics facility.” “Now that Luke has been implanted, we’re looking forward to upgrading his processor with the new 120 software when it becomes available. My wife and I are also talking about somewhere down the road having Luke implanted in the other ear to maximize his hearing perception.” “We truly have big hopes for Luke. We want him, when he grows up, to be successful in whatever he does and have a fulfilled life. We believe that with our decision to have him implanted, we’ve taken a very important step in making that possible for him.”

(Interview by Rich Smith)