When I first began to write about lipreading, my eyesight was practically my only way of grasping verbal communication. I had never perceived speech as much more than a garbled mess, and there were plenty of sounds I'd never heard, even with hearing aids. Lipreading was paramount.
In 2010, I got a cochlear implant in my left ear and my experiences began to change. A cochlear implant is a surgically installed device that can provide a sense of hearing to someone with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. The device—consisting of an external sound processor, a transmitter and an internal receiver—bypasses the ear canal to directly stimulate the auditory nerve.
My cochlear implant dunked me into a torrent of sound. I started the confusing, exhilarating, often frustrating process of learning to hear—that is, learning how to interpret the tangle of what I heard. The device, for all its powers, has not turned me into a hearing person, nor has it rendered lipreading an irrelevant skill. It never will. Yet that previously unthought-of word—listening—has made communication far easier, and simultaneously more complex, than seeing alone.
I no longer know, sometimes, how much I've seen versus how much I've heard. My still-dominant sight accepts the still-fumbling helping hand of sound, and occasionally when sight falls short, I realize that sound has filled the gap instead. I still lipread but, with sound as an understudy, my eyes no longer work alone. In incorporating sound into its repertoire, my brain has proven itself to be willing and flexible—and in doing so has challenged my sense of the possible.
At the end of a day, I have far more energy. My temples no longer throb from so much watching. Conversation is easier and inherently more enjoyable. Communication has become a hybrid between sight and sound, between lipreading and listening. A pleasure no matter how it occurs.
