Restoring Hearing: Cochlear Implants Give Two People Their Lives Back

When you lose your hearing, voices around you become muddled. You find it difficult to communicate and interact with with other people, and you begin to lose clarity. You may become isolated and suffer silently. “I felt like I was on the outside looking in,” says Jim Corridon, who developed his hearing loss gradually, over many years. That feeling of isolation was also true for Casey Dingus, whose moderate-to-severe hearing problem may have started at birth. “I wouldn’t be able to hear the teacher, and I wouldn’t know what was going on,” she says.

A cochlear implant is a powerful device that can bypass the damaged inner ear and stimulate the hearing nerve to recreate hearing. It can help people with profound hearing loss to communicate again and get their lives back. It is made of an external sound processor that transmits to a surgically transplanted implant. 

This video tells Jim's and Casey’s stories. Doctors Elias Michaelides, MD, and Douglas Hildrew, MD, specialists in the Yale Medicine Hearing & Balance Surgery Program, and audiologists Jennifer Hooper, AuD, and Megan Narron, talk about the nature of hearing loss, treating their patients and how cochlear implants work.

[Read about Medicare and Medicaid coverage updates for cochlear implants.]