Hearing Health Summer 2015 Issue Summer 2015 | Page 21

living with hearing loss

months, and when he was 3 years
old, received a cochlear implant for
his right ear. He continues to use
both devices.
When his fourth-grade teacher
asked her students to write about a
topic they know a lot about, Alex
chose hearing loss and his hearing
devices. The paper impressed Alex’s
speech-language pathologist at
school so much that it was shared
on Speech4Hearing.com, a website
that offers speech advice for parents
of children with hearing loss.
It also impressed us at Hearing
Health Foundation. Here are a few
excerpts from Alex’s paper:
“There are two ways to help
people with hearing loss hear.
One is a common way, a hearing
aid, and the other way is not as
common but is getting more
common every day, which is a
cochlear implant. I have both,”
Alex wrote.

Getting a cochlear implant is not
a small undertaking; it’s an invasive
surgery, requiring general anesthesia,
and an overnight stay. “It was pretty
traumatic for everyone,” says Nada
Alsaigh, Alex’s mother. “He fought
going into the surgery, and came
out wearing a big bandage.”
The head must heal for four weeks
before the implant can be turned on
and be programmed, or mapped, to
fit the specific hearing requirements
of the patient. Then the brain has
to learn to process the sounds that
the implant picks up and delivers
directly to the brain via the auditory
nerve. “We were lucky,” Nada says.
“Alex was a very fast learner when it
came to using the implant to hear.”
“The way you hear with a
hearing aid is like a first aid
kit. The hearing aid assists
the person in hearing,” Alex
wrote. “An implant is better
than a hearing aid because you

can hear better with it. The
reason is that the implant has
a computer-like processor that
sends the sound through the
nerve to the brain.”

At school, Alex supplements
his hearing devices with an FM
system—“It is special because you
can hear from far away or if it is
noisy because the range is 25 to
50 feet!”—and he raves about new
technology that allows him to hear
underwater.
“If you have hearing loss, you
can’t hear in the water while
swimming or showering,” Alex
wrote. “When the [Cochlear
Nucleus] Aqua+ came out,
things changed! The Aqua+ is
a cover for the implant with a
waterproof coil. This is such
a cool device—I am so happy
to use it! I can hear splashes,
bubbles, and people, and I
am connected to everything
around me. It is great to be
able to hear all the time.”

Alex and his brother Joe, who is
12, are incredibly close. “We face
challenges and we try to overcome
them,” Nada says. “This was a
learning experience for all of us,
and it made Joe more mature at a
younger age. Joe is just a loving and
supportive brother.”
Social and developmental issues
can arise due to a child’s hearing
loss; however, the fact that Alex’s
family works together minimizes
those issues. They treat Alex’s
hearing loss as a part of who he is
without defining wh