Going through life with hearing loss is hard. But sometimes modern medicine can offer amazing solutions.

Consider what Sandi Wayman, 47, of Roseburg, Oregon, faced. As a young child, she was often in trouble for not listening or responding to the adults in her life. When she was three years old, Sandi's grandmother noticed her reading lips and mimicking other people's lip shapes. A hearing test revealed the reason for her inattention: She had severe-profound hearing loss in both ears.

A childhood with hearing loss

It’s unknown if Sandi was born with hearing loss or whether ear infections during infancy were the cause. At the age three, she was fitted with her first pair of hearing aids. She walked outside with her “new ears on,” looked up at the sky, and asked, “What’s that sound?” For the first time, she was hearing the wind blowing through the trees.

Sandi’s early years in school were tough. She recalls how she “couldn’t comprehend things as fast as other kids could.” In her small elementary school, she was the only student who wore hearing aids. She felt embarrassed by her hearing aids and often wore her hair down to hide them.

Sandi didn’t experience anything new in terms of hearing right after her surgery. But that’s typical. Her activation day — the day when the audiologist turns on and programs the settings for a CI — arrived four weeks following her surgery. She remembers this day as “weird but exciting.”

The first sound Sandi recalls hearing through her CI was the “click-click” of the car’s turn signal on her journey home after activation. “I had no clue what it was, and it took my hubs a few minutes to figure it out too, since it is a sound he always hears.” In the days that followed, she began to hear voices, including her own, which “sounded like a tinny Mickey Mouse!” she recalls.

Through listening to music and putting herself in crowded places, Sandi trained her brain to make sense of the new sounds from her CI. It took a year of rehabilitation for her to get to the point where she is today. She says, “It was hard and overwhelming at times, but it worked out because now I have 99% word recognition, and this is with background noise!”

One of the things Sandi loves about her CI is that it enables her to hear music better. Her CI package came with a phone clip, which streams music directly into her sound processor via Bluetooth. She says, “Nobody else can hear it, just me. And I can hear it so clearly! The lyrics to songs are not how I used to sing them pre-CI — I think the artists just got them wrong,” she jokes.

Life with cochlear implants

Living with a CI isn’t always smooth sailing, Sandi admits. “I still have days where I get overstimulated and have to take my ‘ears’ off for a while because it is exhausting. But I would take this any day versus not being able to hear,” Sandi told HearingTracker.

Sandi considers her cochlear implant journey as one of the best decisions she’s ever made.

“Sure, it was scary as heck, but I can now hear birds singing, rain falling on the windshield, my dog’s toenails clicking on the hardwood floors, my cat’s funny sneezes, and even hummingbird wings flapping,” she says. “It is amazing hearing these sounds that most people take for granted. I love it all!” That’s a resounding recommendation and reveals the truly transformative impact these devices can have on a person’s quality of life.