Shouting Won't Help by Katherine Bouton

Author:Katherine Bouton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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VOICES: LORIE SINGER

Lorie Singer works at the Cochlear Implant Center at New York Eye and Ear and seems to be the go-to person for everything, though officially she is Technical Services Coordinator. She has one cochlear implant and is considering getting another, but I wouldn’t have known she had any hearing difficulty if she hadn’t told me.

I see Lorie almost every time I go to the implant center, but one day we sat down in her office for an interview. She has an M.B.A. in business management and an undergraduate degree in biology. Her background led her naturally to medical publishing, where she was working when her hearing went. She couldn’t hear the phone ring, she said, and finally made an appointment with an audiologist. “How do you get through the day?” the audiologist asked sympathetically. “I burst into tears,” Lorie said. Someone finally recognized what she was going through. A hearing aid in her left ear enabled her to keep working until she was thirty-nine. At that point, once again unable to use the telephone, she felt she had to leave the job.

“I was really frustrated,” she said. “I was ready to kill someone.” As with many New Yorkers, her first stop was the League for the Hard of Hearing. Dorene Watkins, an audiologist, told her she needed a cochlear implant. “But I’m not deaf,” Lorie responded. Classic denial. Her hearing loss is genetic. Her grandmother was deaf by the time she was forty. Both her mother and her sister have hearing loss.

Dr. Hoffman, then at NYU, did Lorie’s surgery in 1996. The procedure was more major than it is now, involving a larger incision, called a Lazy J. (That incision replaced the C incision, which basically opened up a flap of skin the size of your palm.) She had the surgery on a Wednesday, spent the night in the hospital, and went back to work the following Monday. NYU suggested she wait six months for auditory rehab, but she started after three months. “I pursued it on my own, at the League for the Hard of Hearing.” Her initial experience with the implant was difficult, but, she said, “I had no choice but to learn to use it. It was totally horrible at first. But now Paul McCartney sounds like Paul McCartney.”

She also worked with Books on Tape, reading along with them. “A lot of hard-of-hearing people develop a life where they don’t talk to people, even after they get the implant. Even though it wasn’t my job, I’d make all kinds of suggestions. Go to a lecture, go to Barnes and Noble to a reading, listen to Books on Tape.

“My expectation was that the cochlear implant would give me a little better sound,” she said. “But it’s better than that.” Still, she cautions people not to expect too much. “People who have more hearing loss do better, are more appreciative. People with less, people who come in and say they want one because they want to be able to use the phone a little better, they’re more likely to be disappointed.

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