The way ahead

First things first. I needed to have a fair degree of audiological assessement. Notwithstanding the fact that a consultant at one hospital had told me to 'come back in December', at least that hospital [whose ENT Department shall be nameless] did take the hearing loss seriously enough to look to step up through the hearing aids.

So on November 1st I moved to using a Sprint 2 hearing aid, and then - on reassessment on 23rd November - up to a Senso aid, both magnificent hearing aids but increasingly not powerful enough to cope with the hearing loss.

We had at that stage completed NO - note, NO - tests other than one lonely pressure test in September and a series of pure tone audiometry tests at 'nameless ENT Department'. There had been no ABR test, no stapedial impedance test...nothing. Zip.

So seeing Tony Wright at 150 Harley Street on 5th October, in which he readily posited a significant progression of my SNHL (and kindly gave me an intratympanic steroid injection to help...the first act of intervention other than a few betahistamine tablets from 'nameless ENT Department') was both a shock and a relief.

I left the consultation reeling. It was as bad as I suspected, but what were the options? Tony has shown me a photograph of a section through the cochlear, pointing out with a move of the hand that many hair cells were 'gone', and that that in all probability - to be confirmed - was the cause of the hearing loss. He had suggested that I needed, quickly, to get referred to the Cochlear Implant programme at the RNTNE Hospital.

I knew about cochlear implants of course, but not enough. My usual mode when faced with anything new is to search the literature (a good academic impulse!) but I also made my way to the bookshops. I bought Michael Chorost's book 'Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human' (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) [Michael's website at http://www.michaelchorost.com/] is helpful for the uninitiated].

That book completely shocked and disoriented me. At once amazed at the technology, fearful of the implications (a CI is a one-way bet; if it doesn't work, you can't just take it out and return to your deaf-but-still-getting-a-tiny-bit state...) and surprised by Chorost's evident love of the 'cyborg' state that implantation produces, I was genuinely thrown by it. I sat up, night after night, hoping that having a CI did not demand this kind of celebratory acceptance, even love, of the technology. I couldn't find it in my heart to feel warmth and gratitude to the bioengineers and software developers...it seemed inhuman, even a denial of the human.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table, at half two in the morning, sobbing quietly at the thought that this was likely to be the one option. That it was not going to produce a return to 'hearing'. That it would mark me as profoundly deaf so totally I'd wear a processor and hook-up on the outside of my head like a sherriff's badge in a western movie...A CI may be a wonderful thing technologically, but it is not a perfect solution.

That, however, is breakthrough thinking. Once you accept that even this brilliance - or the technological brilliance to come as CIs improve - is not going to make you whole again, you can begin to face it, even embrace it, then (possibly) yearn for it with realism.

I will be honest here. I cannot love the prospect of a CI yet. I need it, it is my only option, but I cannot (yet) love the thought of the thing.