When I was younger, my speech-recognition scores were approximately 80 percent in my left ear and 90 percent in my right. With my hearing aids, those scores gave me enough information to understand most of the words and sounds around me. For many years, my hearing profile remained remarkably stable. But as I moved through my thirties and forties, I began to feel as though I wasn’t hearing as well as I once had. Approximately 15 years ago, my speech-recognition scores dropped to 70 percent in my left ear and 80 percent in my right.
I noticed the difference, but it was relatively small. I was still receiving enough information through my hearing aids that the decline didn’t interfere significantly with my daily life. Then, two years ago, I requested another evaluation because my hearing once again seemed worse. I was asking people to repeat themselves more frequently, and conversations required more effort than they had before. The results surprised me.
My speech recognition had dropped to 60 percent in my right ear and 40 percent in my left. What was particularly strange was that my overall hearing profile, the sounds that I could detect during the standard hearing test, hadn’t changed significantly. The change was in my ability to understand speech. I could hear that someone was talking. I just couldn’t always understand what they were saying.
Fast-forward to March 2026. I started a new job that required me to work in the office three days a week. Once I was navigating conversations, meetings, commuting and the everyday noise of an office again, I began to feel that my hearing had declined even further. In mid-April, I called the audiology department at Northwestern Medicine and requested another hearing test. Surely, it was nothing. My hearing thresholds had been stable for years. Maybe I needed different hearing aids. Maybe my current hearing aids needed to be adjusted. Maybe the unfamiliar environment was simply making hearing more difficult. But the results absolutely shocked me.
My general hearing profile was still largely unchanged, just as before. But my speech recognition had dropped again. This time, my left ear scored 12 percent. My right ear scored 25 percent. That was a massive decline in only a few years. I was shocked, frustrated and worried. My hearing aids could still make sounds louder, but they could no longer give me enough clarity to understand the words within those sounds. That was when a cochlear implant was recommended. Not necessarily so I could hear more sound—but so I might understand more words.
I researched the hell out of cochlear implants. I needed to understand the surgery, the technology, the possible outcomes and the risks. Most of all, I had to decide whether it was better to preserve whatever hearing remained in my left ear or take the leap into an entirely different way of hearing. For weeks, I went back and forth.
A cochlear implant couldn’t guarantee that I would understand speech better. Surgery could eliminate the residual hearing in the implanted ear. If the implant didn’t provide a good result, I could lose the little hearing I still had without gaining the clarity I desperately needed.
But eventually, I had to ask myself a difficult question: What was I really preserving? My left ear could recognize only 12 percent of speech. The hearing I was so afraid to lose was already failing to give me meaningful access to words. So, I decided to move forward.
I was excited by the possibility of hearing what I had been missing. I was also terrified. This was major surgery, the results were not guaranteed, and there would be no way to return my ear to exactly what it had been before. It was a risk. But continuing to lose access to speech without doing anything was also a risk.
And now, the dates are set. On July 2, 2026, I will undergo surgery for my cochlear implant, July 13, 2026, it will be activated. And then I will begin learning how to hear all over again.
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