Twice as Good: Bilateral Implants for Adrean Mangiardi
--Twice as Good: Bilateral Cochlear Implants for Adrean Mangiardi --
{caveat: not yet edited!}
The first device ever to replace a human sense received its stamp of approval in 1984. That year, cochlear implants were marketed as safe – as more than “experimental” – by the FDA. Today, the largest population of cochlear implant users found in one place congregates in Rochester, New York, at the world’s first and largest technological college for deaf students: The National Technolgical Institue for the Deaf.
This institute, better known as NTID, is home to over 11,000 deaf staff, students, and faculty, and of these, 180 can hear birds chirp better and footsteps advance faster than their deaf peers because they have chosen to get a cochlear implant. Now, three of these 180 implant users have taken yet another step; they’ve gone on to do something that’s practically unprecedented, even in the relatively young field of cochlear implants: they’ve gotten implant #2.
“Getting bilateral implants,” said Karen Black, director of communications at NTID, “is the newest of the new in cochlear implant technology.” This is impressive in a field whose modern history spans less than 25 years. True, a researcher named Volta put metal rods in his ears over 200 years ago, in 1790, but his attempts to stimulate hearing with electricity were not successful. And in 1961, when clinician William House performed the first modern implant surgery, much to the dismay of the neurophysiologists who wished he’d “keep [his] hands out of [their] cochlea,” scientists were skeptical. They doubted that the single electrode mechanism of an implant could cause anything beyond a buzz in the ear. As such, it wasn’t until about 20 years ago, with the FDA’s official accolade, that the cochlear implant was taken seriously by both the scientific and medical community. After this, research and advancements progressed rapidly.
But all study was directed at one effort: making sound perception and language acquisition better with a single implant. One implant for creatures with two ears. Great strides were indeed made; most notable was Graeme Clark’s 1985 invention of an implant that, unlike William House’s, used multiple electrodes. Clark’s was the first device in history that permitted even severely deaf people to understand speech. Previously, scientists had thought that providing quality speech understanding, even with the benefit of more than one electrode, was impossible since the inner ear requires 10-20,000 neurons to do so. Clark proved them wrong.
But amidst his and other advances, questions loomed in yet another place: the deaf population. To get an implant, or not to, many wondered. Getting even one was questionable, especially since benefits seemed variable from patient to patient. Today however, three students at NITD, including 25 year-old film major Adrean Mangiardi, have moved beyond wanting one implant and are happily sporting two. “My life is way better now,” Adrean says of his bilaterally-implanted days. He underwent a second surgery that was both painful and costly (implants are 40,000$ a piece). And I sought him out to learn why.
* * * * *
Adrean Mangiardi is technologically-savy. He studies film-making at Rochester Institute for Technology, supported by NITD, where he can maneuver video equipment with finesse. He also understands the in’s and out’s of the physics behind the bypass filters in his cochlear implants, in case he needs to troubleshoot. My interview with him – the self-proclaimed “brave man who’s desire to listen doesn’t stop [him], even though the idea of bilateral cochlear implants is fresh” -- was done via email, from my MAC to his.
The 25-year old Pennsylvania native, deaf since age __, got his first cochlear implant ten years ago, when he was 15. “Before I had the first one,” Adrean said, “I was losing my hearing each day. But I had a disgusted look on my face whenever I saw wire [from an implant] on somebody else’s body. I hated being deaf though and wished to be normal like everybody else.”
Adrean said that it was his mom who finally motivated him to go through with the first surgery. “One day she and I were driving to the mall and she started begging me to get the first implant,” he said. Adrean doesn’t recollect why; he had been able to communicate reasonably well with both of his hearing parents. He was actually surprised at his mother’s request. “I sighed and thought, why she would ask me that, knowing I didn’t want it?”
After the incident in the car though, he felt himself thinking about his mother’s words a lot more than usual. “From that moment on, I wondered what would it be like to wear the implant,” Adrean wrote. “I made a decision to go for it.” It is clear that his parents had a lot to do with this decison. “My parents know what’s best for me so I thank them for trying to help me out.” The second implant, however, which Adrean got just last year, was an idea that was completely his own.
“I noticed that wearing one cochlear implant was the standard way, but I’m not a standard guy,” Adrean said. “I seek rare possibility and make it happen for me.” He said his interest in film was one reason he decided to double up. “I cannot wait to work in the professional moviemaking business. Having bilateral implants will help me achieve my goal in filmmaking.”
Adrean also expressed that even though his single implant aided him greatly – letting him hear doors squeak and birds squawk as he’d never heard them before – he still had trouble localizing sound in large groups. He couldn’t pick out one voice amidst many, in other words, as he might need to do in a party situation, or in any large group scenario. “I wanted the second implant because I thought it could improve my life on a daily basis with my friends, too.”
His friends, in fact, were surprised by Adrean’s impulse. “One time, I was at a party at my friend’s apartment,” he recounted, “and I met a couple of girls who only wear one implant. I explained my plan of getting the second one and they were shocked.” When Adrean asked them what the “big deal” was if he only wanted to hear well, the girls explained that they wouldn’t want to go through that surgery again for anything.
“It was the surgery that scared them away,” he said. Adrean looked past it though. “I knew that it would be painful, but cochlear implant lasts forever, at least I hope, and I am the evidence that wearing two implants is a good way to improve your listening ability.” When he bumped into the skeptical girls a second time, outfitted with not one, but two implants, they asked him a billion questions about his new bilateral experience. “I think one day,” he said, “they will plan to get another one.”
But the road to bilateral victory wasn’t greased. There were other skeptics, besides Adrean’s friends, and there were uncertainties. Adrean’s physician didn’t actually know if the second implant – a $40,000 investment – would benefit they boy at all. “The doctor said that it might not help one bit or it might help a lot,” Adrean said. “But, what does he know? He’s not using it. He’s a doctor who can put things into our head and that’s it.” Adrean continued to express – in his written response – that with his second implant, and with some experience since the surgery, he is doing a lot better now than he had been when wearing just one. “Way better.”
There were mild side effects, however. After all, 2 implants is a lot of titanium and platinum for a brain accustomed to interacting with only bone. “I know that I didn’t get dizzy from the first implant,” he said, “but after I got the second one, I was dizzy for a few months because my inner balance was tampered with.” This dizziness is supposed to happen –a product of the ________ in the brain. But with Adrean’s second surgery, it lasted longer. “I didn’t know that the symptom would last that long,” Adrean said, “and I stumbled more than usual in the first few months after surgery and my eyes wouldn’t stay still when I tried to look at a something.” A year later, Adrean says that he is fine. The dizziness is gone and his vision is focused. “I’m very happy about that,” he confided. “I thought those problems would be permanent.”
And day to day, his life is richer. The biggest noticeable difference though, Adrean said, is not his ability to excel in filmmaking, or to distinguish a voice from across the room in a crowded party. “It is the birds. There a lot of noticeable differences now that I have two implants, but birds are one thing that I never heard before when I was a kid. Now, I hear them everywhere and it is so cool. I wish to film the life in a rain forest because there I will hear bird sound that I never heard before.”
Adrean also explained that though he’d been using his first implant for 10 years, and that had worked well enough, having a second one “gave me a boost to hear certain decibels, especially higher ones, that I couldn’t reach before.”
Oddly enough, there are ways in which having two implants, versus one, limits Adrean. “With one implant, I can wear a hat. I can’t with two because the hat would be pinching my head together. It’s not a good feeling.”
Regardless of any difficulty in donning a hat, Adrean says that the best way to explain the difference between having one implant and having two is that his life was fine before, “but now my life is improving everyday.” He’s especially happy with his ability to localize sound and no longer feels frustrated in large groups. He’s no longer overwhelmed by noise because he can now extract individual sounds better from it. He sees himself as a leader, too. “I hope that others will follow and understand the possibility of having a better chance of hearing things with two cochlear implants.”
I asked Adrean one last question: You’re surrounded by efforts to improve hearing at NTID, so what do you see as the next big break-through in hearing technology? His answer kindled my imagination. “I once had a dream that there would be a cochlear transplant,” he had typed. “There’s a liver transplant, a heart transplant, a kidney transplant, and so on. Why not a cochlear transplant, too? I seek for something natural as possible instead of something electric and artificial.”
There is nothing artificial about Adrean Mangiardi, or his drive to accomplish what he seeks. We may see his films. We may find him in rainforests. Either way, he will clearly hear – and be worthy of – our accolades.
.MGW.
{caveat: not yet edited!}
The first device ever to replace a human sense received its stamp of approval in 1984. That year, cochlear implants were marketed as safe – as more than “experimental” – by the FDA. Today, the largest population of cochlear implant users found in one place congregates in Rochester, New York, at the world’s first and largest technological college for deaf students: The National Technolgical Institue for the Deaf.
This institute, better known as NTID, is home to over 11,000 deaf staff, students, and faculty, and of these, 180 can hear birds chirp better and footsteps advance faster than their deaf peers because they have chosen to get a cochlear implant. Now, three of these 180 implant users have taken yet another step; they’ve gone on to do something that’s practically unprecedented, even in the relatively young field of cochlear implants: they’ve gotten implant #2.
“Getting bilateral implants,” said Karen Black, director of communications at NTID, “is the newest of the new in cochlear implant technology.” This is impressive in a field whose modern history spans less than 25 years. True, a researcher named Volta put metal rods in his ears over 200 years ago, in 1790, but his attempts to stimulate hearing with electricity were not successful. And in 1961, when clinician William House performed the first modern implant surgery, much to the dismay of the neurophysiologists who wished he’d “keep [his] hands out of [their] cochlea,” scientists were skeptical. They doubted that the single electrode mechanism of an implant could cause anything beyond a buzz in the ear. As such, it wasn’t until about 20 years ago, with the FDA’s official accolade, that the cochlear implant was taken seriously by both the scientific and medical community. After this, research and advancements progressed rapidly.
But all study was directed at one effort: making sound perception and language acquisition better with a single implant. One implant for creatures with two ears. Great strides were indeed made; most notable was Graeme Clark’s 1985 invention of an implant that, unlike William House’s, used multiple electrodes. Clark’s was the first device in history that permitted even severely deaf people to understand speech. Previously, scientists had thought that providing quality speech understanding, even with the benefit of more than one electrode, was impossible since the inner ear requires 10-20,000 neurons to do so. Clark proved them wrong.
But amidst his and other advances, questions loomed in yet another place: the deaf population. To get an implant, or not to, many wondered. Getting even one was questionable, especially since benefits seemed variable from patient to patient. Today however, three students at NITD, including 25 year-old film major Adrean Mangiardi, have moved beyond wanting one implant and are happily sporting two. “My life is way better now,” Adrean says of his bilaterally-implanted days. He underwent a second surgery that was both painful and costly (implants are 40,000$ a piece). And I sought him out to learn why.
* * * * *
Adrean Mangiardi is technologically-savy. He studies film-making at Rochester Institute for Technology, supported by NITD, where he can maneuver video equipment with finesse. He also understands the in’s and out’s of the physics behind the bypass filters in his cochlear implants, in case he needs to troubleshoot. My interview with him – the self-proclaimed “brave man who’s desire to listen doesn’t stop [him], even though the idea of bilateral cochlear implants is fresh” -- was done via email, from my MAC to his.
The 25-year old Pennsylvania native, deaf since age __, got his first cochlear implant ten years ago, when he was 15. “Before I had the first one,” Adrean said, “I was losing my hearing each day. But I had a disgusted look on my face whenever I saw wire [from an implant] on somebody else’s body. I hated being deaf though and wished to be normal like everybody else.”
Adrean said that it was his mom who finally motivated him to go through with the first surgery. “One day she and I were driving to the mall and she started begging me to get the first implant,” he said. Adrean doesn’t recollect why; he had been able to communicate reasonably well with both of his hearing parents. He was actually surprised at his mother’s request. “I sighed and thought, why she would ask me that, knowing I didn’t want it?”
After the incident in the car though, he felt himself thinking about his mother’s words a lot more than usual. “From that moment on, I wondered what would it be like to wear the implant,” Adrean wrote. “I made a decision to go for it.” It is clear that his parents had a lot to do with this decison. “My parents know what’s best for me so I thank them for trying to help me out.” The second implant, however, which Adrean got just last year, was an idea that was completely his own.
“I noticed that wearing one cochlear implant was the standard way, but I’m not a standard guy,” Adrean said. “I seek rare possibility and make it happen for me.” He said his interest in film was one reason he decided to double up. “I cannot wait to work in the professional moviemaking business. Having bilateral implants will help me achieve my goal in filmmaking.”
Adrean also expressed that even though his single implant aided him greatly – letting him hear doors squeak and birds squawk as he’d never heard them before – he still had trouble localizing sound in large groups. He couldn’t pick out one voice amidst many, in other words, as he might need to do in a party situation, or in any large group scenario. “I wanted the second implant because I thought it could improve my life on a daily basis with my friends, too.”
His friends, in fact, were surprised by Adrean’s impulse. “One time, I was at a party at my friend’s apartment,” he recounted, “and I met a couple of girls who only wear one implant. I explained my plan of getting the second one and they were shocked.” When Adrean asked them what the “big deal” was if he only wanted to hear well, the girls explained that they wouldn’t want to go through that surgery again for anything.
“It was the surgery that scared them away,” he said. Adrean looked past it though. “I knew that it would be painful, but cochlear implant lasts forever, at least I hope, and I am the evidence that wearing two implants is a good way to improve your listening ability.” When he bumped into the skeptical girls a second time, outfitted with not one, but two implants, they asked him a billion questions about his new bilateral experience. “I think one day,” he said, “they will plan to get another one.”
But the road to bilateral victory wasn’t greased. There were other skeptics, besides Adrean’s friends, and there were uncertainties. Adrean’s physician didn’t actually know if the second implant – a $40,000 investment – would benefit they boy at all. “The doctor said that it might not help one bit or it might help a lot,” Adrean said. “But, what does he know? He’s not using it. He’s a doctor who can put things into our head and that’s it.” Adrean continued to express – in his written response – that with his second implant, and with some experience since the surgery, he is doing a lot better now than he had been when wearing just one. “Way better.”
There were mild side effects, however. After all, 2 implants is a lot of titanium and platinum for a brain accustomed to interacting with only bone. “I know that I didn’t get dizzy from the first implant,” he said, “but after I got the second one, I was dizzy for a few months because my inner balance was tampered with.” This dizziness is supposed to happen –a product of the ________ in the brain. But with Adrean’s second surgery, it lasted longer. “I didn’t know that the symptom would last that long,” Adrean said, “and I stumbled more than usual in the first few months after surgery and my eyes wouldn’t stay still when I tried to look at a something.” A year later, Adrean says that he is fine. The dizziness is gone and his vision is focused. “I’m very happy about that,” he confided. “I thought those problems would be permanent.”
And day to day, his life is richer. The biggest noticeable difference though, Adrean said, is not his ability to excel in filmmaking, or to distinguish a voice from across the room in a crowded party. “It is the birds. There a lot of noticeable differences now that I have two implants, but birds are one thing that I never heard before when I was a kid. Now, I hear them everywhere and it is so cool. I wish to film the life in a rain forest because there I will hear bird sound that I never heard before.”
Adrean also explained that though he’d been using his first implant for 10 years, and that had worked well enough, having a second one “gave me a boost to hear certain decibels, especially higher ones, that I couldn’t reach before.”
Oddly enough, there are ways in which having two implants, versus one, limits Adrean. “With one implant, I can wear a hat. I can’t with two because the hat would be pinching my head together. It’s not a good feeling.”
Regardless of any difficulty in donning a hat, Adrean says that the best way to explain the difference between having one implant and having two is that his life was fine before, “but now my life is improving everyday.” He’s especially happy with his ability to localize sound and no longer feels frustrated in large groups. He’s no longer overwhelmed by noise because he can now extract individual sounds better from it. He sees himself as a leader, too. “I hope that others will follow and understand the possibility of having a better chance of hearing things with two cochlear implants.”
I asked Adrean one last question: You’re surrounded by efforts to improve hearing at NTID, so what do you see as the next big break-through in hearing technology? His answer kindled my imagination. “I once had a dream that there would be a cochlear transplant,” he had typed. “There’s a liver transplant, a heart transplant, a kidney transplant, and so on. Why not a cochlear transplant, too? I seek for something natural as possible instead of something electric and artificial.”
There is nothing artificial about Adrean Mangiardi, or his drive to accomplish what he seeks. We may see his films. We may find him in rainforests. Either way, he will clearly hear – and be worthy of – our accolades.
.MGW.
posted by Meagan G at
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