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Good evening, and welcome. Please find your seat. There is no need to turn off your pager. My name is Mary Salerno. I am fifty-five, a retired insurance underwriter, a grandmother, and an opera lover since the age of nine, when my father turned on the Saturday afternoon broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera while he waxed the Buick, and I sat on the back step and heard a soprano die of consumption and decided that was the most wonderful thing I had ever heard. My mother thought I was a peculiar child. She was right. Over twenty years, I lost my hearing. By 1995 I was profoundly deaf. In November of 1997 I had a cochlear implant, and in the fall of 1998 my husband Merle took me to hear La Bohème, the opera I love best in the world, for the first time in five years. This page is the story of how I got from the back step to that seat in the fourth row. It is for people who are losing their hearing as grown-ups, for people thinking about an implant, and for the families who love them and are tired of repeating themselves. I hope it helps. I have tried to be precise, because precision is how I survived thirty years of insurance applications, and because when you lose your hearing, people tell you a great many vague and hopeful things. I am not an audiologist or a doctor. Your own will know your own ears. ~ · ~ · ~ It ran in my mother's family. My mother wore a hearing aid by fifty and so did her sister, and their mother before them was famous at Sunday dinner for answering questions nobody had asked. I thought of it as something that happened to old ladies. Then, in my thirties, I started missing things. It went slowly, and it went from the top down. The high sounds left first. I stopped hearing the birds in the morning before I noticed I'd stopped. The telephone in the next room. My daughter Heidi whispering, then my daughter talking. The sopranos went before the tenors, and the tenors before the basses, and for a few strange years I could hear the cellos in the pit perfectly well and Mimì only as a shimmer above them, like heat over a road. I got my first hearing aids at thirty-eight and stronger ones every few years after that. They helped, until they didn't. A hearing aid makes sound louder. It can't make it clearer if the part of your ear that sorts it out is worn away. By the early nineties I could hear that people were speaking, but not what they were saying. I lived on lipreading, captions on the television, and an enormous amount of guessing. I went to the opera for the last time in 1993 and sat in the dark watching beautiful people open their mouths. I came home and told Merle I wouldn't go again. That was the worst night of the whole business. By 1995 the aids gave me almost nothing. I was profoundly deaf. People who are born deaf, or who lose their hearing as small children, grow up with it. Those of us who lose it as adults are called late-deafened, and it is a different road. We lose something we had. We lose our ease in the world: the phone, the dinner party, the joke at the office, the radio in the car. Many of us lose friends, quietly, because talking to us becomes work. We aren't part of the Deaf community, because we don't have its language or its history, and we aren't part of the hearing world anymore either. I spent two years feeling like a guest in my own house. I was very lonely, and I'm not ashamed to say it. I first heard about cochlear implants (well, read about them) from a woman at a meeting of a hard-of-hearing self-help group, who had one, and who leaned across the table and asked me how I was in a perfectly normal voice and then understood my answer without looking at my mouth. I went home and sat in the car in the driveway for twenty minutes. It took me another year to decide. I was frightened of the surgery, and more frightened of hoping. Here is what helped me decide:
~ · ~ · ~ Intermission · What a Cochlear Implant Is, and Isn't People have strange ideas about this, so allow me.
~ · ~ · ~ I had the operation on Thursday, November 6, 1997, and spent one night in the hospital. It was much less dramatic than I'd feared: an incision behind my ear that healed faster than I expected, a sore jaw for a week, a shaved patch I hid with a scarf, and some dizziness that passed. Then I waited. They switched me on Tuesday, December 9, 1997. I have written about that day, and about the whole first year, in my hearing diary: the first sound, the turn signal on the drive home, the morning Merle's voice came back to me, my first telephone call, and the long, slow return of music. I won't repeat it all here. I'll only tell you that on the way home from the hospital I heard a ticking in the car and asked Merle what on earth it was, and he said, "The turn signal, Mary," and had to pull over, because neither of us could see. Music was the last thing to come back and the thing I wanted most. For months it was noise. A Puccini record sounded to me like a brass band falling down a staircase. I stopped trying for a while. Then I tried again, with music I knew by heart, so my memory could do part of the work, and slowly the shapes came back: first the rhythm, then the rise and fall of a melody, then something like the difference between a soprano and a tenor. On Saturday, October 24, 1998, Merle took me to a small regional company's La Bohème in a high school auditorium in Warwick. Fourth row, aisle, with supertitles projected above the stage, which I recommend to every hard-of-hearing opera lover alive. It was not the Met. The orchestra was twenty-six people and the garret was painted plywood. It was the most beautiful performance of anything I have ever attended. I did not hear it the way I heard it at twenty. I want to be honest. The orchestra was sometimes a blur, and the high notes came through bright and thin, like light through a keyhole. But I heard Rodolfo's voice, and then Mimì's answering it, and I knew which was which. In Act Two I heard Musetta's waltz and the whole crowd at the Café Momus, and I laughed in the right place. And in Act Four I wept exactly as I have wept at every Bohème since 1953. Merle held my hand through the whole last act. At the curtain call he leaned over and said something, and I heard it, and I am going to keep what he said to myself. ~ · ~ · ~ Notes for the Audience
I want to say something carefully here. Many Deaf people, those who were born deaf or became deaf young, who use American Sign Language and belong to the Deaf community, do not see deafness as something broken that needs to be fixed. They have a language, a history and a culture of their own, and some of them see cochlear implants very differently than I do, especially for children. I have read their reasons and I take them seriously. My choice was a late-deafened woman's choice, about getting back something I had for forty years and missed every day. It was right for me. It is not a judgment on anyone else, and I hope no one reads it that way. If you'd like to understand the Deaf point of view from someone who lives it, please visit Eight Hands Talking, Janelle Whitford's page about her Deaf family in Rochester and American Sign Language. She writes generously, including to hearing parents, that the big decisions about hearing aids and implants belong to each family and their doctors. I learned a great deal there. Self Help for Hard of Hearing People (SHHH). A national organization of and for people with hearing loss, with local chapters. Mine was where I first met someone with an implant. If you are losing your hearing and feel alone, go to a meeting. You'll find a room full of people who will look at you when they talk. The Association of Late-Deafened Adults (ALDA). For people like me, who lost their hearing after growing up hearing. They welcome whatever way of communicating works for you: lipreading, sign, writing notes, implants, hearing aids, all of it. Nobody there will ever say "never mind." Your audiologist and an implant center. If you're wondering whether you might be a candidate, ask your audiologist or ear doctor to refer you for an evaluation. Asking commits you to nothing. Books on tape. Not an organization, but my best friend for the first six months. Listen while you read along in the printed book. My library was wonderful about it. ~ · ~ · ~ Members of the audience to date     I answer every letter, and e-mail is my favorite way to talk. [email protected] Every ear is different. Please speak with your own audiologist and doctor. Last updated Sunday, September 12, 1999 |