I’m Mike, and this is my blog about life with hearing loss and building cool stuff

This is a new adventure for me

So,

Why do this?

• Because I have a story to share, and hopefully show others Hearing Loss isn’t the end of the road
• AND I love to build stuff and share it

I’m a Dad of two teenage girls (my penance for a misspent youth!), a terrible husband (she is up for Sainthood, I’m sure!), a Full Time Field Operations Manager for a Detention Equipment Contractor and spend all my “free time” building fun and cool projects in my barn. (That me and a couple buddies built!LOL)

I’ve dealt with Hearing Loss (HL) for as long as I can remember- I was good at faking it. A couple years ago (1995 🙂 ) While I was in the Marine Corps, I tried to catch a mortar round- didn’t work out so well. Turns out that was when things started going down hill for my ears.

I started with hearing aids 17 years ago. My hearing just kept getting worse and finally my audiologist sent me to a specialized ENT at IU Methodist. Dr Nelson thought I would be a good candidate for a new BAHA (Bone Anchored Hearing Aid) by Cochlear Americas called the BAHA 5 Super Power. So I had surgery for the abutment, got the device and was amazed at all I had been missing. Unfortunately everything wasn’t peaches and cream, I kept getting infections at the abutment site, and after a year of fighting the, they removed the abutment- turns out there was infection in the screw part, so they let that heal and a three months later put in another one.. once again things sounded good, but after a few months I noticed my cat quit purring, water faucets were not as loud and I got a new infection. At that point Dr. Nelson suggested we do the Cochlear implant elevation. After test, we figures out I qualified, so we had surgery to remove the BAHA AGAIN- this was the last week of February 2020, and they scheduled my implant for March 2020. Of course, life has a way of just being crazy, especially during a pandemic!LOL so I went deaf on my right side for a few months until the end of June when I was implanted with a Cochlear 621 Nucleus, then activated July 15th.. I am a lucky one- what they refer to as a Rock Star. My activation went perfect, and I could immediately understand speech, the next day after my second mapping, I was at 94% speech recognition, something everyone was excited about! Fast forward to January and at my 6mo mapping I was at 99% speech recognition, but unfortunately my left ear with the hearing aid had deteriorated down to 12%, so we scheduled the surgery to go Bilateral. That surgery was yesterday! So in a few weeks I will update on how that activation goes.

I know the more you write the more regular the content the better the results with these things, and I will do my best to post about past and current builds and my hearing journey.
‘thanks for reading!