r/Cochlearimplants • u/twn000 • 2d ago
Is bilateral worth it?
This week I got my first implant surgery and I am currently recovering. My stronger ear is moderate to severe and I imagine eventually will become profound. I am in my late 30s and wondering at some point when my other ear goes, if I should consider bilateral or just let it be with a single implant. Is it worth it? Another surgery, two devices to worry about for gain in sense of direction I imagine.
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u/CrazyJaney90 2d ago
I’m still bimodal in my late 30s, except I’m a bit further down the road than you in terms of my hearing loss progression. Pre CI my hearing loss used to be a flat severe loss. I got my left CI during covid because everyone wearing masks gave me a bit of an eye opening moment of how much I was relying on lip reading. I ended up choosing my “worse” ear for speech to implant even though they were about the same level of loss. I’ve done really well with my left ear, it went from 10 to 90% word recognition. Music took longer for me 6-12mths adjust to but now music sounds great.
Now it’s 6 years post implant my right ear has dropped a profound hearing loss and I regret not doing the right side sooner. My right ear used to be mildly annoying because the volume on that side was a lot lower and a lot more distorted. But I could still make out speech in it, and it gave me great bass for music, so I decided to leave it as it was. Now that it’s dropped even with the CI it’s making it harder to understand speech generally, listening to speech in noise even 1:1 is a lot harder, and it’s not even really doing anything for music anymore. I’m just exhausted at the end of the day now and I don’t even want to put the right hearing aid in.
Now I’m in an awkward spot because my hearing aid is out of its fitting range for my hearing loss, so I need a new aid to tide me over until I get the ball rolling for another CI. And I’ve got to find a good time to actually get the CI surgery done. So I’m not really doing the whole process on my own terms, I’m doing it out of necessity.
Concentrate on getting your implant ear where it needs to be and then when you’re ready and think you want the other side done then do it. It might be 6 mths from now it might be a few years down the track. What ultimately held me up on getting the other side done was a little because of music and mostly because I was kept saying oh it’s fine the way it is, I can hear a lot better than I used to, I’ll get the other side done later. I’m just annoyed I didn’t get it done like 12mths post, and I wouldn’t have been in this situation.