Hearing Health magazine recently published my article “I Didn’t Know I Was Deaf Until I Discovered Better Hearing” in the Winter 2026 issue. I am also including the article below for you to read here.
I received a diagnosis of progressive bilateral hearing loss two decades ago. The deafness had likely been around a long time. It was the second time in my life I’d met with an audiologist. The first time was when the audiologist told me as a kid to pay attention.
I was six years old. The listening lab in kindergarten class was a semi-circle table with headsets worn by classmates. The objective was to listen to an audio story and then discuss with the teacher. The story’s words were a bunch of aahs and oohs mumbled by a female voice. What was she saying? Why did the other kids know what to discuss with the teacher after the audio story ended and I didn’t?
Afterward I told my parents, or maybe my teacher did. I remember going to an audiologist’s office and being given headphones to wear in a listening booth. Instead of words that sounded like aahs and oohs, I heard a few beeps. Every time I heard a beep, I pushed a button on a device that looked like a game controller. It was like a game that I wanted to master. When I didn’t hear any beeps, I waited about three seconds and pushed the button anyway.
“Your daughter’s hearing is normal,” is what the audiologist told my mom. “She just needs to pay attention.”
I won the game!
Childhood was like that: part of a guessing game as to what people were saying or what sounds I heard and where they came from. I remember my family saying I walked and talked really loud, but that didn’t make any sense because I couldn’t hear my own footsteps and I didn’t intend to shout.
I remember friends asking why I didn’t answer to my name from several feet away when I was looking at them, but I never heard my name. People from behind bumped into me in crowded places, and I didn’t know they were behind me until I heard the mumbled words that became loud like they were shouting at me.
It was a game of figuring out what people were saying or why they were mad at me. It was making sense of jumbled words and frustrations that didn’t make any sense.
One of the complexities of progressive hearing loss is you never know when you’ll no longer hear.
That happened to me twenty-four years after a diagnosis of bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. After a bout with a virus, I journeyed into this bewildering world of not hearing sounds I used to hear.
I used to be able to have phone conversations wearing hearing aids. I used to have conversations with people if they sat close and near my better hearing ear.
Lip reading allowed the conversations to flow, with a few requests of “Could you repeat that?” Hearing aids also empowered my ears to hear consonant sounds that are common to speech: the “th” and “s” sounds, all of the “wh” questions.
One night laying in bed, I felt feverish, my head approaching a migraine. After some sleep, I woke the next morning to no fever or migraine but a sense of fullness in my left ear, my better hearing ear. The ear I ensured was facing a person’s mouth as they talked with me. The ear from which I heard the morning alarm clock. The ear that had just enough hearing to benefit from a hearing aid and my ability to read lips. I could no longer hear in this ear.
Sure, there were some muffled sounds and mumbled speech I could still make out with the ear. But people’s words became unintelligible.
I remember my husband, a soft-spoken person, sitting ten inches from my better ear while I wore both hearing aids. Words that I once could hear from him were now garbled, like an unknown language I could not understand.
After consulting with two audiologists and an ENT, I was approved for cochlear implant surgery in 2025. Prior to the procedure, my unaided hearing provided only seven percent of speech comprehension.
Two weeks after surgery, my Cochlear Nucleus 8 was activated. It was initially programmed at level one or “comfortably loud” according to a sound chart. Voices, at first, sounded robotic with a reverberating echo.
As my brain adjusted to hearing sounds in a different way and deciphered meaning from the sound, I transitioned to program levels two, three, and eventually four.
It was at my 30-day CI mapping appointment that I transitioned to the level four program, which my audiologist explained is closely associated with a comfortable hearing volume that is not too loud or soft. My CI comes with a remote control and phone app I can use to adjust the programs and volume.
At the 30-day mapping appointment, I also received a new hearing aid for my unimplanted ear that was synched with the CI so that I could hear via Bluetooth using both devices.
The audiologist took me into a sound booth and tested me using the previous test I had completed prior to surgery and scored seven percent in speech comprehension. I was asked to listen to sentences wearing my CI and to repeat them word-for-word. Thirty days post-activation, I completed the hearing test with 94 percent accuracy. I was informed that many people test at 60 to 70 percent accuracy one year after activation. It was truly a miracle to clearly hear words that had been so hard to hear before.
These days, I’m feeling more confident with my CI listening comprehension skills. I started a podcast called Deafinitely Talking, in which I interview other individuals in the deaf and hearing loss community about their experiences. It is available on YouTube and Spotify. I also blog regularly about my CI experiences.
A future goal is to learn to play the piano, something I’ve wanted to do since childhood. It is now a possibility thanks to better hearing.
###
A special thank you to Hearing Health magazine and Hearing Health Foundation for the opportunity to share this story. If you would like to support the foundation’s work to advocate for individuals with hearing loss, visit Hearing Health Foundation.
Lipreading Mom 