Fighting Insurance

Getting an implant didn't come without a fight. At first, everything seemed to be going in the right direction. The insurance had approved the claim. Then, out of blue, one week before pre-op and 2 weeks before surgery, they denied the claim. Why a sudden change? They decided it wasn't medically necessarily. They wanted us to explore other options. What other options? There were none. My cochlear was dead, period. There's nothing that can be done.

My ENT tried calling and talking to them several times on my behalf but they wouldn't listen. They even claimed that he didn't call them. That was only the beginning. Day after day after day, my mom kept calling, yelling, screaming on the phone that they had to close her door! She works in a hospital, so you can imagine hearing her scream on the phone from across the hall. It wasn't until we threatened to sue that they called back a day later and said it was approved.

I learned something else that day, too: another person who was scheduled to get an implant from the same doctor got turned down by their insurance. I'm starting to think: what the hell is wrong with this picture and insurance? We pay them to cover ourselves but they don't want to pay?? Just why the hell are we paying them? It's all a bunch of bullshit. But if you fight and never give up you can win. Threating to sue is a big thing, they don't want to be sued, so they (most of the time) will approve the claim. Besides, who gave them the authority to say something is medically necessarily or not? It wasn't like I just wanted one b/c it's popular and everyone is doing it. I NEEDED it! Duh!

I understand why we have insurance, but if they can't do their job, then they don't deserve the business or money. Besides, it was in our policy that they covered cochlear implants. They were only digger a deeper hole for themselves. They knew that if we sued, they couldn't win, and that's why they approved it (once again).

If you are ever denied insurance for a cochlear implant, I would suggest fighting. You can win and you probably will. I did.

Overcoming Fear

Getting a cochlear implant didn't come without fear. Two nights before surgery, I dreamed of being in a coffin, not making it through surgery. I can still clearly remember the details of the coffin: it was red (my fav. color) inside, and I was getting into it! The night before, I didn't even go to sleep until 1 am and had to get up at 3 am to travel to New Orleans to be there for 5 am with the surgery at 7 am. The one thing that keep me going was knowing that one of my professors was also having surgery on the same day at the same hospital. I knew as soon as I was dozed off, my spirit and her spirit left our bodies, met in the lab, and did differentials on blood smears even though I don't remember anything.

But I did have other fears: how would people react? How would that see me? How would I be treated? Would people look down on me? All those questions kept sticking to me, I was afraid that I would be seen differentially. Before I lost all my hearing, I wore a hearing aid, but you couldn't really see it unless I put my hair in a ponytail. But with a cochlear, it's also impossible to cover with your hair down, except the headpiece. It had been almost 3 months since I had the implant turned on and I started my clinicals/internship at Our Lady of the Lake in the beginning of January. I was deeply afraid of not being able to hear. At 3 months, I was still learning how to process sounds and words, I still couldn't talk on the phone and still struggled with distance and noisy backgrounds. But as time went on, all my fears, questions, and concerns subsided. Everyone I worked with at the Lake was nice and never hesitated to answer my questions or repeat what they were saying when I would ask them to repeat what they said.

I got into a wreck with an ambulance the day after the National Championship game (Geaux Tigers!!). I was tired b/c I stay up later than expected since the Tigers won and had to get up 5;30 am, so I was excited and couldn't sleep. Anyway, this was still at a time where I couldn't talk on my cell. So I had to text my mom back and forth. One of the EMT's called my mom from my cell to talk to her since I couldn't. They were nice and understanding when I told them I had a cochlear implant. Time and time again, I've learned over and over than Anne Frank's words are true: "Despite everything, I still think people are good at heart." Indeed if people weren't good at heart, the EMT wouldn't have call my mom for me; the people at the Lake wouldn't have been so nice; and my professors at LSUHSC wouldn't have let me miss class and make up the material.

I got 3 new roommates in January when I moved back to Baton Rouge from New Orleans for clinicals. I was scared about how they would react and how they would treat me. It didn't take long for it to go away, only about a several weeks. I'm happy to report that we all get along and I have good roommates. We are moving out of the apartment and into a house next month!

My fears of being treated and seen differentially are gone. I have been treated the same as I was before I lost of my hearing. I have not been seen differentially by my professors at LSUHSC or my classmates. In fact, I have gain more respect than I excepted. For a while, I was hesitated to tell people that I have trouble hearing b/c of fear. Now, I can say it with pride and without hesitating. If they have a problem with it, then so be it, b/c I know everyone has trouble hearing every now and then. Sometimes, when I do have trouble hearing someone, I turn my head so that the t-mic on the implant faces them to receive the sound and block out the background noise. Alot of times, when they see it, they realize that I'm having trouble hearing and speak up, slowly, or clearly. This just proves: people are good at heart. I have seen other people do the same thing, even my mom. So it's a natural thing when you see someone do that.

Now that all of my fears are gone, I do one thing: hold my head up head and be proud. Yeah, so I have a cochlear implant and can't hear out of my right ear. I am who I am.

What I Like About My Implant

There are several things I like about my implant, but what I like most is being able to hear. A close second is that I don't have to put it inside in ear, the microphone sits at the base of my ear. With my old hearing aid, which went in my ear, I was constantly getting itching inside my ear from the ear wax that was pushed down by the tube on the hearing aid. What bothered me the most was that I had to take it out and scratch, but sometimes it was hard to scratch b/c how am I suppose to reach into my ear? Sometimes it would happen right in the middle of class, that aggravated me alot.

I also like it that I can charge my batteries, decreasing the amount of money spent on hearing aid batteries (which are NOT cheap). Another great thing about these batteries are that when they are finally worn out after years and years of use(as oppose to weeks for a hearing aid), I can return them to the company for recycling, saving the environment and animals as well as people from the harmful chemicals and metals in the batteries. I am a big "pro" Earth and pro-recycling.

Unlike a hearing aid, my implant is programmable. Which means when something goes wrong or the program gets messed up, all I have to do is go to my audiologist for an adjustment and it can be fixed. Where as a hearing aid only last for 10 years, then you have to buy another one (only if the insurance doesn't pay for it and most don't). In other words, the implant is like a computer: it's programmable and is bound to have random errors like a regular computer.

Another thing: my implant is resistant to moisture, sweat, rain (water), and weather although I have to take it off if I go swimming. My hearing aid was not.

The only big down fall: I cannot have an MRI. If an MRI is needed, I have to get the implant removed before I can do so. But I think with everything that I have experienced so far, I don't regret it. So if I need an MRI? Well, I can do a CT scan, but if an MRI is necessarily, then I guess I will get it removed and then have it put back, but only after consideration.

This past weekend, I was able to hearing another first: while watching LSU baseball in the CWS, I could hear the bat hit the ball on TV! I've never been able to hear that before. I can hear the music in stores more clearly and better than I have in the past too! I was dancing to "Brown Eye Girl" by Jimmy Buffet and "What I Like About You" by the Romantics in Winn-Dixie. I think people thought I was crazy, but I couldn't help it.

All in all, the best thing about the implant is hearing things I have never heard before. And not just hearing things, but to be able to distinguish sounds and words. Some things sound even better than they did before. I think it's a success!

Learning to Hear Again

Although I can hear clearly now, it has taken several months to get used to the implant. It also took several different programs to work with before I became comfortable with the ones I like the most. It took about 3-4 months after getting the implant turned on to hear clear and crisp. The first time it was turned on, it sounded like everyone was "high". Haha. Music and keyboard typing sounded like a piano. And I wasn't able to talk on my cell phone right away. But the more I wore it, the better it got, and now I can't go without it. Of course it was frustrating sometimes because I was going to med tech school at the same time and it is essential that you listen to the professor or you will get lost. Or whenever I wanted to call someone to talk to because I had exciting news or something was too long to explain through text messaging. Now I have a new cell phone (a Samsung slider), and it is great! It works very well with my implant.

Another problem I had was with my walkman. It was a 2002-2003 product, so you can imagine it wasn't very implant friendly, which did make me sad for some time because I loved my walkman and listened to it everyday. I got a Sony mp3 player for Christmas last year, and the first thing I did was listen to it and was so happy: CLEAR!!! Clear music filled my ears for the first time since I lost all my hearing 9 months previously. I almost cried. It felt so good to hear again, to hear the music that I loved, to be given an opportunity, a second chance at hearing.

After losing my hearing, I fell into a deep depression, and for the following 8 months, I really didn't care whether I was dead or alive. It was really, really hard on me. Before I got the implant, I had headaches everyday, I was exhausted for trying so hard to not only hear, but to understand what was being said, I couldn't talk on the phone, I couldn't listen to music, I couldn't do anything: my cochlear was dead. All I could think about was being able to hear again, being able to enjoy the things I valued with my ears. I always took care of ear so I wouldn't lose anymore hearing than I had already lost, but unfortunately, some virus decided to kill my left ear (my good ear) instead of my right ear. Had the virus attacked my right ear, it wouldn't have mattered. My right ear is too severely damaged (auditory nerve twisted) to be able to comprehend words.

I'm still learning about sounds and words. Things I've never heard before sound so amazing when I realize what I was missing out on, even before I lost all of my hearing. Alot of times, my brain will sometimes play tricks on me: I think I heard something, but in reality, there's nothing to hear. I think it's funny in some weird way that my brain is trying to say, "Hehe, I tricked you!" Or, "I'm having fun!! I'm going to do that again!" Hey, brains can have fun!

Hearing with a cochlear implant

This past weekend, I heard an owl hoot for the first time. I have never heard an owl hooted before. Mostly b/c I was hearing impaired when I was growing up. But I lost all of my hearing last year, most likely due to a virus. There is no definite dx. I lost it while in med tech school, and was fortunate enough that the audiologist who did the testing and cochlear implant adjusting was at my school, LSUHSC, on the 9th floor of the same building where I had all my classes on the 10th floor. My ENT was only 30 minutes away also, so I didn't miss too much class time. My professors were very supportive and patient, letting me miss class and making up the material. Since I've have the cochlear, little less than year, for the first time, I've been able to hear things I didn't. Here's a few:

-I can hear my dogs pant.
-I can hear crickets, even when they are not loud.
-I can hear owls hoot.
-I can hear in the distance.
-I can hear behind my back.
-I can hear almost like a normal person, sometimes better than a normal person.
-I can hear and actually understand what is being said over the radio, given that I'm paying attention (sometimes I'm not b/c of traffic, but sometimes I do, to learn where wrecks are and avoid that area)
-I find myself saying, "Turn that down" rather than "turn that up".
-I can hear the cars and trucks on the highway when I'm at my brother's house.
-I'm still learning how to 'filter' sounds when I'm in a nosiey place, like a resturant.
-I can hear music better.

That's all I think of at the moment. Indeed, technology is amazing, without a cochlear implant, I would be deaf in my left ear. My right ear is severely damaged (the auditory nerve is twisted), so it is very hard to understand someone with a hearing aid along. I have, time and again, made my mom smile when I say, "I heard that!" I've never said that very much. My professors have also notice a difference in my hearing and speech as well. One time I was mistaken when I was studying in my hematology teacher's office, I heard the phone ring and told her, "You're phones ringing." She said, "That's not mine. I think that Dr. L's. You heard that?" Me, "Loud and clear." "That is so great. " Me: go back to studying. I glad to be apart of this amazing technology, although I sometimes get discouraged. Sometimes it is hard to hear, even with a cochlear implant, it depends on certain things, like whether or not a person's voice carries, background nosie, and mumbling. I still use closed captioning on movies and TV, and I still read lips, b/c that's the way I grew up. All in all, my hearing has improved, probably better than what it was before I lost all my hearing.