It’s difficult for Monet Lindstrand to feel like a member of the Deaf community.
The third-year Ball State student is missing the hairs on her cochleae — the hairs that vibrate when sound passes through the ear drums so the brain can process the noise. Those hairs have always been missing; she was born that way.
Monet has cochlear implants in both her ears, which stimulates her auditory nerves and allows her to hear. She said she has had cochlear implants for as long as she can remember. She got her first one when she was 18 months old and her second when she was 4 years old. She was also in speech therapy for most of her childhood.
Katie Jones, cochlear implant audiologist with the Riley Hospital at IU Health, says cochlear implants are for people with “a significant amount of hearing loss that are not able to benefit from traditional amplification like hearing aids.”
She says cochlear implants are surgically implanted and are drilled into the inner ear, or cochlea, when patients do not benefit from traditional hearing.
“Research shows us that the sooner a patient is implanted, the more likely they are to reach their maximum potential to develop listening and spoken language skills,” Jones says. “The FDA has approved implantation as young as nine months of age; it was previously 12 months.”
Jones says the optimal window for a child to develop speech is between birth and age 3, so the earlier they can get a cochlear implant, the better. Jones also says that cochlear implants can be beneficial for adults who lose hearing later in life.
“A lot of times, it takes quite a while for [adults with hearing loss] to recognize that they have a problem understanding because it’s just a gradual decrease in speech understanding,” she says.
Like Monet, Jones says it’s difficult for most with cochlear implants to feel connected to the Deaf community, especially if they don’t know American Sign Language.
“I do spend about 90% of my life hearing,” Monet says, “because the only time I don’t have my cochlear implants on is when I’m in the shower or sleeping.”
Because her parents and sister can all hear, Monet did not learn sign language growing up and still does not know it.
“I think that’s given me a unique perspective on it,” she says. “I’m very good at lip reading. I picked that up very, very well … My parents always joke that I should join the FBI because I can tell what people are saying and [lip read] full conversations.”
Like Jones said, only people with severe hearing loss need cochlear implants. Nick Lesko, third-year architecture major, does not have cochlear implants, but has had hearing loss his whole life.
Nick was born with hearing loss, but it wasn’t hereditary or because of anything that happened while his mom was pregnant with him.
“It was an anomaly,” he says. “It might have been something genetic, but no one really knows. I was just born hard of hearing. It’s not degenerative, so it has not gone down steadily over the last few years.”
Nick uses hearing aids in both his ears rather than a cochlear implant, and depending on the frequency, it’s more difficult for him to hear some sounds. Nick says he has most of his lower hearing, so he can hear lower frequencies better than higher ones, but his hearing aid helps him hear everything.
“My hearing aid specifically has a program to balance that out,” he says. “They don’t boost the high end a lot. That’s different with everyone, based on what they have or don’t have.”
While they may have different severities of hearing loss, both Monet and Nick say the COVID-19 pandemic has been a big hurdle for them. Since Monet lip reads to better understand what people are saying, masks made it more difficult for her to tell what people were saying.
Nick was the same way, especially during his first year of college.
“I was not always on the same page with the rest of the class,” he says. “I would catch what felt like 30 to 40% of what was said, and then I would just fill in the gaps. But there was just a lot of conversations or instructions or studio environments that I was not all the way up to speed on, and I took a big hit outside of that.”
Monet realized during the pandemic how much she relied on lip reading and being able to see people’s faces.
“I realized, ‘Wow, I do rely on people’s lips,’” she says. “You can’t just make stuff up.”
Even though she has had her struggles, Monet says she’s grateful her parents made the decision to get her cochlear implants when she was a child.
“My life would be very, very different if I didn’t have my cochlear implants,” she says.
