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.

Background
My husband Mark & I had 3 beautiful girls and felt extremely blessed with our precious family. Amanda was 4, Cassie 2 ½ and Madisen was 10 weeks old when Madisen contracted pneumoccocal meningitis. Her symptoms weren't anything to be alarmed at. She had a fever of 102 degrees - not extremely high. She wouldn't eat and she couldn't seem to wake up. She just lay there. Lethargic...

In relaying these symptoms to the doctor's office, they didn't show alarm, so I didn't get worried. The nurse was worried by her breathing and immediately called the doctor in. He touched the 'soft spot' on the top of her head, left the room and came back in about 30 seconds saying, "I have an ambulance coming. I think she has meningitis."

Wow, what does that mean? Now I'm not just worried, I'm terrified! I had to get word to my husband immediately and leave Cassie who was so little alone at the doctor's office until family could pick her up. What a scary time for the entire family!

Madisen went through the incredibly scary procedure of trying to save her life. She was in the hospital for 12 days, which is typical it seems for meningitis when diagnosed early. I remember the day we brought her home. She looked exactly like the day she got sick, but couldn't raise her head and had very weak body tone. We knew we would have to do therapy to strengthen her muscles and help her to eat. But the diagnoses of deafness came as a complete shock. We were told at her follow-up appointment by her pediatrician 2 days after release from the hospital.

We left the hospital with no resources to help us with our new journey with our now deaf child. Two days later we did get a flyer in the mail that shared a Parent-Infant Sign Language Program offered by the Deaf Service Center. Here was our answer on how to communicate with Madisen. Our family and some friends jumped head first into learning sign. Maddy signed her first sign at 7 months…"more" -- at the same time she received her hearing aids and started speech therapy. What a busy month! Can you believe it took us 4 months to get hearing aids? It was difficult to find the funding.

For the next 2 years we had a routine of speech therapy working on getting her to talk - the focus was not on 'learning to listen', building our sign vocabulary and finding the right program for her. Unfortunately we saw her frustration growing as her socialization was limited to whom she could sign with. She wanted to play with the kids in the neighborhood, but they tended to ignore her or even be scared of her, as they didn't understand her babbling or signing. At the time she was in a deaf and hard of hearing preschool and loved it. She was surrounded by children her age that knew sign and they had a common bond…hearing loss.

The Decision
When we first heard about the cochlear implants an option, I immediately said "No way!" due to my fear of the surgery. But as her frustration grew, my eyes were opened to looking into this technology for her. We were able to experience first-hand a couple of our friend's kids go through the surgery and be comforted by how quickly they bounced back.

Madisen was almost 3 years old when she had her cochlear implant surgery. She did extremely well through the surgery, which lasted 2 hours and recovery went very smooth. She just wanted to sleep and watch cartoons all afternoon and evening. Bright and early the next morning she was ready to pull that IV pole down the hall to play in the hospital playroom. We went home that morning and the month wait began until activation. Remember we used sign language, so this period wasn't really any different except she had surgery and we were very excited about change in the future for her.

Activation was a very long day - thankfully that has changed with amazing new software technology for programming. Her first day of activation was 3 hours long and we really needed to rely on her conditioned responses. She really didn't act like she was hearing anything. Her responses seemed drilled. When live speech was turned on, she did turn her eyes up slowly when the sound was turned off, but nothing drastic.

Leaving that day, we really weren't on cloud 9, as we didn't have a night and day experience. But…later in the restaurant where we took her to celebrate, she went into the restroom and I couldn't get her out of the stall. I was signing under the door, "you need to hurry up. Daddy is waiting." Suddenly she opened the stall door with eyes wide as saucers, signed to me "Do you hear that?" as she flushed the toilet over and over again, "I hear that!" It was such a cool revelation that she indeed was hearing. A fun memory that the toilet had to be her first real environmental sound, but hey, she was hearing!!

Results
From that day on, she walked around signing all the time, "I hear that!" or "What's that?" pointing to her ear constantly. It was such a fun time watching her discovering sound and making the connections between what she was hearing and the word/object associated to it. We went against our professionals' advice and allowed her to keep her sign. We really felt that she would hate the implant and us if we took the only communication mode she had. We were confident that as she progressed with spoken language she would stop using her sign. That is exactly what we have seen.
 
Madisen has now been hearing with a cochlear implant for 6 ½ years. It's amazing how time flies! We did have a glitch in the road back in January 2003 when she took a tumble and hit directly on her implant side against a large metal pole and the implant stopped working. She immediately could not hear. What an emotional time for the entire family! Madisen was amazing though because she so wanted to hear again. We were so proud of how brave she was during that time. We were blessed to be able to go through surgery again just 5 days after the accident. The silver lining of the ordeal is that she now has the CII and has been using the HiResolution Sound Processing since activation Jan. 30, 2003.

We have seen some wonderful benefits from this new technology for her. Her speech is clearer, she indicates hearing things that she hasn't before and we have had some fun hearing discoveries. One example was her puzzlement at hearing a neighbor's dog bark. I assured her that she had heard a dog bark before, to which she responded, "not like that before". Then spent that afternoon throughout the next morning imitating the bark (Great Dane) and comparing it to her 2 dogs' barks (Lab and Shepard). In her 8 year-old dialogue she was telling us that she was getting more information that showed her that dogs were like humans and did have a variety of differences to their barks.

Madisen had been on an oral journey since the move to California the summer of 1st grade. Then when she had her accident, we didn't want her missing out on all the academic information that was shared in the classroom. We put the sign interpreter back in for 2 months per the IEP. One month for the time between surgery and activation and one month to adjust to HiResolution. What we found out from the school team was that Maddy was raising her hand to participate in class, her comprehension was raised and she had stopped chewing her nails. How could we take this valuable tool away, but would it slow or stop her progression with spoken language? She had worked so hard to come this far; we didn't want her to regress.

Happily we can say that she needs the sign at school for instruction, but she doesn't sign outside of school. She does have some friends who love to learn sign, so they like to practice with her. She will tell them however when they want to sign all the time, "you can talk to me. I don't need you to sign."

Maddy uses an interpreter at school to make sure she gets all the important academic information. She has transitioned from a sign-only child at 3 years old to a non-stop talker! She continues to have speech therapy two times a week at school during the school year and once a week private all year long.

Maddy had three roles in Wizard of Oz - all singing parts. No solos…yet. When the do it again in two years she wants to try out for the Wicked Witch! Wow! That will take lots of practice.

One of my favorite things for Maddy is that we can have a conversation via the cell phone when I travel. That has been a real heart warmer for me, because if we had stayed sign-language only, how would I have conversed with her during my travels? It's awesome!

This truly has been an amazing journey for all of us. We can't imagine what life would be like for Maddy had we not given her this opportunity to hear. We really feel that having the cochlear implant has opened her life to many opportunities.