"Hello!" "Good afternoon, can I help you?"
"I have a one o'clock appointment today with Carisa."
I've been going to Boys Town since I was very, very young to work with them on my hearing
loss. I have a degenerative hearing loss that we started noticing when I was in grade school.
All the hearing that I have is below the normal range of hearing and in that there are specific
sounds that I can't actually hear at all, S-H, T-H and a lot of the soft sounds.
My hearing loss, I think, is around the same level and it manifests in exactly the same
way, as far as, the spottiness of it, the things that we can hear, and over the years
what we have lost as far as the higher pitches and things.
The things I know I used to be able to hear as a child or even 10 years ago that I can't
hear as an adult. The example I use is my Dad does a whistle when he walks in the front
door and I realized at one point I couldn't hear it anymore.
We had looked into hearing aids in the past and they hadn't really worked out for us because
of the specific hearing loss that we have. We kind of always worked through it and read
lips and stuff like that. We had always been checking in with Boys Town
for technology that could be helping us. They had started this study with the type of cochlear
implant that I ended up getting, where it's a hearing aid and a cochlear implant. We started
discussing it and it sounded like it was the perfect thing for somebody with my kind of
specific type of hearing loss to look into. We're one of 10 institutions around the nation
that are participating in the study of this particular device. The processor takes sounds
from the environment, interprets them as being high or low and presents them either acoustically
or an electrical stimulation. It does this very fast and does it based on the patient's
needs, which is a very unique processor.
"The blatant display of favoritism was shocking to the class."
With normal, nothing going on, I was hearing about 33 percent, actual speech, not just
noises, but understanding the words that were being said.
"rob" "rob"
At this point I'm at 95 percent speech recognition in this ear. It's already helped me professionally.
The job that I have right now I wouldn't be able to do without it. I was on the phone all day today
with people and I used to not be able to talk on the phone at all.
In my personal life I didn't know that microwaves when you hit the buttons and suddenly there
are all these timers on things like my oven that I never knew were there before but suddenly
it makes a noise when it's done cooking. I had no idea!
"This green line would match these and our only concerns are these two low pitches."
It gets cool slowly and over time. It's not like this instantaneous benefit. It's something
where you immediately see the potential but then it's kind of a slow process of actually
realizing it. There's a lot of patience and perseverance to get through it but there are
little cool things to get you through it all the time. Like I said, the little noises that
you hear that you never heard before. Those are little tiny victories you have all the
time to kind of carry through the process.
Finding out that Jenny was doing it, I immediately wanted to be a part of the study as well.
It's something I was very interested in and the sooner the better, as far as, doing something
to improve my hearing. Boys Town is the only group in Omaha that's
currently involved in this study and has access to that technology. We like to think we are
at the cutting edge of communicative disorders here at Boys Town. That's one of the things
that we are all about. We think that it opens up a large population that is currently very underserved
in terms of their hearing loss and we now have a tool that we can really help
them with. I do feel very lucky to have grown up here
and have this environment, such a great facility and we've always had such good experiences
here with the audiologists and the people we've worked with. It has been nothing but
a positive experience for me.