|
JOANNE PETERSON, profoundly deaf for six years, has
seen her son play the piano many times — but now
she can hear him.
“He played Beethoven,” she says, “And
I thought that was so pretty to sit and listen to it.
Peterson is one of just 10 Americans wearing a new
bionic ear. It’s not a hearing aid; it doesn’t
amplify sounds for the hard of hearing. It’s for
the truly deaf, converting sound into electrical impulses
and sending them directly to the main hearing nerve,
restoring the ear’s ability to sense voices, even
everyday noise.
“The simple, little pleasures of life,”
says Peterson. “It’s, you know, your microwave
dinging, and your turn signals clicking, and the telephone
ringing.”
More than 500 deaf Americans now wear one part of the
bionic ear, surgical implants installed below the skin,
in the back of the head. The breakthrough, currently
under review by the Food and Drug Administration at
30 clinics across the country, is the new software —
10 times more sensitive than anything currently on the
market.
“The bionic ear is capable of delivering information
[in an] order of magnitude more detailed than anything
else that’s ever existed,” says Dr. Edward
Overstreet, an audiologist at Advanced Bionics.
In Los Angeles, Cassie Bunker had her new software installed
Wednesday, an upgrade that changed the sounds she heard
from synthetic, digital tones to natural sounds.
“I adore it, do not take it away,” Bunker
says. Three days after surgery she could hear. “It
was a major shock to the system, to my head ... but
also to my whole spirit. My whole psyche was going,
holy, moley, I’m hearing things.”
The best candidates for the newest bionic ear are what
audiologists term the “profoundly deaf.”
A good test is if you can’t use the phone anymore.
It works best with those who once could hear.
Doctors expect FDA approval by the end of the year for
the device, which will cost $50,000 and is expected
to be covered by most insurance programs. And for the
majority of America’s 2 million deaf, it’s
a promise of sweet sounds thought lost forever.
-NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw 7/19/01 (http://www.msnbc.com/news/602645.asp)
|
