Sudden Onset Hearing Loss

my cochlear implant processor

It’s been a tough year.

Well, more than a year.

Fifteen months ago, I lost the hearing in my left ear.

All of a sudden, without warning, I woke up to screaming in my head, and it was gone. It felt like someone had scooped out the left side of my head. It's such an odd sensation to suddenly lose one whole side of hearing.

It didn’t come back.

Because my hearing loss was profound, I had two choices. Do nothing or get a cochlear implant (CI). I wrestled through the decision, and six months later I was on the operating table.

The hard work began after the surgery. It’s the brain that makes a CI work—it rewires to make the nonsensical input sound normal. How long will it take? Everyone’s experience is different, but at least a year. That means two hours of rehab every day until that brain of mine does its magic. I’ve made a lot of progress over the last eight months, but things still sound pretty distorted. I thought writing a book took perseverance. (It does.) This is in a whole other category.

Sudden Onset Hearing Loss (SSHL) can happen to anyone for a variety of reasons. They don’t know why I lost my hearing, as every verifiable cause was ruled out, so they assume a virus attacked my cochlea. I wasn’t sick. I had no symptoms of illness. But at 4:52am on Saturday, May 24^th, 2025, how I interact with the world irreversibly changed.

I don’t like thinking about it or remembering what it was like to hear bilaterally. I’m adapting well, and it’s better to stay in the present.

But I do want to remember the people. Wonderful, loving, gracious friends and family took care of me: sat with me when I was panicking, drove me to appointments (because along with my lost hearing, I lost balance), stayed with me while I got steroid injections into my inner ear (and you can’t swallow for 20 minutes), brought me food, took care of my vomit (vertigo), prayed and prayed and prayed for me, and let me cry oh so many tears when I learned this would be permanent.

Rewind twenty years. I was at a school that was the center base for the deaf and hard of hearing population in that district. I LOVED it. I thought about becoming a DHH teacher. Those kids were awesome. I enjoyed learning about our amazingly and precisely designed hearing system, and I enjoyed working with kids who were so mature about their cochlear implants or other hearing technology. Fast-forward to today. Those kids have always had a special place in my heart, making this whole thing easier for me. If they were brave enough to go through such things joyfully, I can be brave too. God arranges things well.

So...rehab. It's a lot, even though it's simple. I don't have to go anywhere. I just have to listen to something through my processor (bluetooth streaming) while my eyeballs match see the same words on the page. So, I have an app on my phone that says isolated words and I have to pick those words out of a line-up. After about 10 minutes of this, I fall asleep. I'm not a napper. I can also watch movies/TV shows with closed captioning, but there's so much music and comparitively little speaking, it sounds extra awful. My last option is to listen to audiobooks while reading the physical book. WINNER. Some amazing people gifted me a year's subscription to Audible to make this easier. I have great and wise friends.

All audiobooks sound about the same--like a bunch of distorted chipmunks. At first I was only allowed to listen/read things I was already familiar with. I would so much rather read without a chorus of chipmunks, but I revisited old favorites--Mitford, Harry Potter, Little House, The Phantom Tollbooth, etc. After a few months of that, I was released to read new-to-me books. I found some middle grade gems: The Kate In Between, The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams, The Secret of Nightingale Wood, and several books by my favorite: Gary D. Schmidt. Then, like so many others, I also discovered and devoured Emma M. Lion. She really made two hours fly by and I even forgot the chipmunks were with me! Almost. I am very sad books 9-25 aren't written yet. What! What!

A few people have jokingly asked me if I’ll now write a kids’ book on cochlear implants. Ha! Actually, if I had an abundance of time, I’ve long had plans for a series of non-fiction picture books with a colored-pencil caterpillar host named Emerill. If I did, hearing and CIs might make the cut. But such dreams must stay in the drawer at least until I’m done with CI rehab.

I've still been writing, though. Yes, at a slower pace than before…which was already slow. But I’ve got three projects going at the moment. Except that sounds too ambitious, so let's say two. Maybe one and a half. I’m hoping my brain rewires soon and I can exchange rehab for writing.

book stack from library