Born with hearing loss due to a congenital anomaly, Lori Davis relied on hearing aids to understand people and learn to talk. Her hearing progressively worsened, however, until even with hearing aids she had to resort to lip reading.

Last fall that all changed when Davis was fitted with a cochlear implant. The 40-year-old Hamilton resident was delighted to hear sounds she had never heard with hearing aids: birds singing, her cat’s surprising assortment of meows, music.

“The first time I heard piano, I didn’t realize how beautiful it was! I almost cried,” she says.

Otolaryngologist Joe VanderMeer, MD, of Lakeshore Health Partners–ENT, explains that cochlear implants don’t restore, but mimic natural hearing for deaf or severely hearingimpaired individuals. They do this by providing electrical signals directly to the auditory nerve, bypassing the damaged cochlea that is usually the cause of deafness. The brain recognizes the electrical signals as sound.

The cochlear implant consists of a tiny, external sound processor worn inconspicuously behind a patient’s ear, and a transmitter that is surgically placed under the skin. Dr. VanderMeer is one of only two physicians in West Michigan—and the only one in the Lakeshore region—specially trained to implant the state-of-the-art devices. He performed Davis’ two-hour outpatient surgery at Holland Hospital in September. A month later, Davis returned to the Holland ENT office to work with audiologist Mary Van Wieren.

“At first she had trouble distinguishing men’s from women’s voices,” Van Wieren notes. “At her last appointment, she was happy to report that she hears some sounds before her normal-hearing counterparts.” Her word testing scores had tripled.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as of December 2010, approximately 219,000 people worldwide have received cochlear implants. In the United States, roughly 42,600 adults and 28,400 children have received them.*

“People who have lost all or most of their hearing later in life are the most likely to benefit from cochlear implants because they can associate the new sound signals with sounds they remember,” Dr. VanderMeer says.

For Davis, one of the biggest benefits of the cochlear implant is that she can now hear and understand people around her without even looking at them—like her co-workers at Target. “I can listen to them and still keep working. Before I couldn’t do that,” she says. “I can be part of the team and communicate with people.”

If you suffer from hearing impairment, talk to your doctor. He or she may refer you to an ENT specialist for a hearing test and to learn best options for improvement.

* Source: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, nidcd.nih.gov.