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Special Needs
cochlear implant
My girlfriend's daughter needs a cochlear implant. She is torn since she is only 5 and has had ear infections in the past month. Does anyone have any experience with the implants, recovery, healing, rejection, etc? any info would be soooo helpful in her making this desicion.
thanks
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Re: cochlear implant
Tell her to check out CI Circle on Yahoo Groups.
My daughter was born deaf and received bilateral CIs at 10 months. She's 19 months now and developmentally on target (says 50+ words, small sentences). I am very happy with out decision. Is your friend's daughter post-lingual? If so, she should have great success with CIs. Adult friends who have received CIs say that, after an adjustment period, it sounds just like they remember.
My daughter's surgery took about 7 hours for both sides. She spent one night in the hospital and was on nothing stronger than Tylenol after 48 hours (and she barely needed that!) We weren't allowed to get her head wet for weeks, so older kids wouldn't be allowed to swim. I have not personally heard of CI rejection. The one surgery complication I've heard of was a reaction to anesthesia. It is more difficult to pick up language the later a child gets CIs if they have never had sound.
Hope that helps! Feel free to ask any more questions.
I just got an email with this link in it.
https://www.gallaudet.edu/Clerc_Center/Information_and_Resources/Cochlear_Implant_Education_Center/CI_Navigating_a_Forest.html
My son is hard-of-hearing/Deaf but not a candidate for CI's...Good Luck to your friend!
...
Our DD lost her hearing to meningitis at 2 yrs old. She is bilaterally implanted and we have never once regretted our decision. We do alot of speech therapy with her, mostly listening practice, and she is easy to understand by strangers...all the sounds of speech are there. She had 1.5 yrs of normal hearing before getting sick, so recovery was helped by that, but it did take that first year post activation to get her up and running with her new "ears." We still have mapping appts every 2 months now, to keep everything working perfectly. We have had CIs in our family for 2 yrs.
We had a very easy surgery. 5 hours total for both ears, and her surgeon only did incisions behind her ears, with skin glue after, so she was hardly showing any wounds afterwards. Her bandages came off while she was sleeping that night, and we traveled home the next day with her just on otc tylenol. She was very comfortable.
There are several Facebook groups (one is Parents of children with Cochlear Implants) that can be great resources in prep for the surgery, etc. I found CI Circle to be priceless in those first few months, especially.
I am a teacher of the deaf. Implant surgery is very safe and the results are amazing. If her insurance company will cover bilateral implants, she needs to get them on both sides. Less than 1% of internal devices fail. Your friend should go to the nearest implant center in order to ask questions and become more familiar with them. She will need to learn how to care for the external device, and her daughter will need to learn how to use the cochlear implant to listen so she can speak. Because 5 years old is kind of old for an implant, she does have a long road ahead of her, but it can be done. She will need auditory verbal therapy, as well as a teacher of the deaf in school (some TODS do AVT as well), and probably an SLP to help her with articulation.
About half my students have cochlear implants. None have had any problems with surgery or the internal devices.
A little late to this... DD has a CI. Our experience with DDs CI has not been perfect, but has had amazing peaks. The not so good parts really are not related to the implant itself, but to other complications from her other special needs. If the baby that I'm carrying right now is Deaf and meets the criteria, I wouldn't hesitate for a second to implant him early on.
I second the CI Circle board. I learned a ton of info there before DD had her surgery. The other thing is getting into an implant center ASAP. The process can sometimes be long (there are a series of steps to meet the "candidacy" criteria) and it really is true that the earlier the implantation occurs the better. Does her daughter have aids at this point? ... You're typically required to show that you've tried them for a period of time before the implant.