Cochlear implant or new hearing aids

I was very interested to hear of your situation.
I had a CI assessment in Nottingham. My word recognition was 60% and so I was judged above the threshold. I was told to wait for my hearing to deteriorate further.
I am profoundly deaf in one ear (so an aid is redundant) and rely on my right ear where my hearing loss is also severe to profound.
I began to withdraw from social situations due to my inability to communicate. TV etc is impossible without Roger and sub-titles.
I began to find my mental faculties deteriorating. Crosswords were taking longer, words were not so easy to recall, etc- as you know, there is a strong correlation between deafness and dementia. I am 68. Things were so bad that I decided to investigate a private CI as the NHS approach of waiting for virtual total deafness seemed unnecessarily cruel and risked mental acuity.
My first step was to get a referall from my audiologist in August this year. He told me of the imminent launch of Phonak’s spherical aids. I tried one in September, and I am delighted to say that I am back socialising and feeling part of life! They are well worth you trying. They are not a silver bullet, but the improvement in comprehension is remarkable, and I can now understand conversation in a noisy pub. CI is still the eventual solution, but I feem my sanity has been rescued! I cannot recommend too highly.

I haven’t posted since the beginning of the year so am writing with an update. Having been rejected for an nhs provided implant, it seemed to me that I would have to wai for 2 or 3 years before my hearing deteriorated to the extent that an implant would be provided.

I arranged for a private appointment with one of the consultants at the Bristol Implant centre but it became clear that although he could provide an implant there were no private audiologists in the Bristol area who couuld provide the necessary (and vital) tuning and therapy. As a consequence, I obtained a further referral to a consultant in London where suitable audiology and therapy would be available.

A CT scan confirmed that I would be a suitable candidate for an mplant in my right ear but also identified that I had a large cholesteatoma n my right ear which needed to be dealt with. After much consideration, I decided to have the choesteatoma excised and the implant fitted in a single procedure whilst accepting that if removing the cholesteatoma took too long then the implant would have to be fitted in a separate operation.

I had the operation in the middle of July. It took around 5 hours but was successful and the implant was activated in early August. The results have been excellent and have by far exceeded my expectations. I no longer need to use speech-to-text apps or subtitles and can cope far better in meetings and in noisy social environments, I chose the Advanced Bionics implant and this came with a Roger ON 3 microphone which is helpful in particularly noisy situations. Therapy and training has been fairly intensive using a variety of apps and podcasts and intelligibility is continuing to improve.

For my left ear I received a phonak Naida hearing aid which works with the implant and can be controlled by the Advanced Bionics app. When listening with just the implant, voices are perfectly intelligible although they can sound a little robotic but when the hearing aid is switched on (providing good low frequency sound) voices sound completely normal. The audiologists recommend using only the implant when I can as my brain should eventually compensate.

Overall, I am very pleased that I took the decision to go ahead with the implant.

David

I forgot to say in my last post, but many thanks to all who provided information and comments.

@whitten_d said:

The results have been excellent and have by far exceeded my expectations. I no longer need to use speech-to-text apps or subtitles and can cope far better in meetings and in noisy social environments, I chose the Advanced Bionics implant and this came with a Roger ON 3 microphone which is helpful in particularly noisy situations.

Congratulations

This is great news. You made some choices and made them happen. Keep us updated please.

Music listening is improved but it is early days so I wold expect this to improve further with time,

Whem I investigated costs it was suggested that I should allow for£40k. I have got medical insurance and this does not normally cover cochlear implants but because of the Cholesteatoma which is an acute condition the insurer agreed to pay so I just needed to pay for the audiology and rehab.

HTH

David

Many thanks for the info- I appreciate the candour. It had been suggested to me that the cost could be £80k, so that is more reasonable than I expected- though still expensive. I finished health insurance when I retired- perhaps that wasn’t the wisest move!

As others have said, I would be very interested in following developments. So far it seems very encouraging. I hope this continues for you.

I understand that music is a tough one- but it is encouraging to ‘hear’ that you are getting greater enjoyment. I imagine that complex orchestral music must be the toughest challenge- but frankly anything that avoids a discordent white noise would be valued by me! Thanks for the info.