More Than Meets the Ear
I am probably the only soul on earth who has ever thought that the muddy waters of Wright Patman Lake have healing powers. Let me explain. My dad has had profound hearing loss since the age of four. He has worn hearing aids since his childhood loss, but to enhance his communication skills, Daddy became an expert lip reader. As a little kid, I was always aware of his hearing loss but was not privy to his lip-reading talent. So, in the summers, when he would take my sisters and me to swim in the lake, I remember watching him remove his hearing aids to spare them from water damage. I was completely unaware he solely relied on lip reading. Naturally, I believed Wright Patman Lake must miraculously restore my dad’s hearing while he was in the water. Without skipping a beat, he always kept up the conversation word for word while splashing around with us. Therefore, I was always up for a swim in the lake because I was convinced its healing waters made my daddy hear again.
Taking it back to 1957, Jim Stanley (my dad) ran an extremely high fever for several days. Tylenol was not an over-the-counter medication back then, so my grandmother could only soak him in cold baths to break the fever. Unsuccessful after several days of trying to combat his symptoms, my grandparents took my dad to the doctor, and he was given the antibiotic, Streptomycin. Unbeknownst to the doctor or my grandparents, the medication cured whatever infection he had, but it caused substantial hearing loss. Dad’s world went mostly silent. He couldn’t hear people around him talking, or cars passing by or leaves rustling, or birds chirping. Sound was no longer a part of his world.
Feeling an enormous sense of guilt and being unwilling to accept the reality that their child might have to grow up with a disability, my grandparents took my dad to every hearing specialist that they could find. Parents are fixers. It is what we do. Every single doctor Daddy saw labeled him as a child with profound hearing loss and offered little hope for successful treatment. The last doctor he saw was a man named Dr. Norman in Longview, Texas. My grandfather says Dr. Norman got very serious with them and said, “You can spend every dime you’ll ever make taking him from one hearing specialist to another, but there is not a thing in this world that can be done about your son’s loss. Hearing aids may help some, but that’s all we’ve got to help him. Maybe one day, when science and technology evolve, somebody will come up with something to restore his hearing. Until then, this is his life.”
Of course, kids can be mean, so when a child is different and wears a hearing aid, in my dad’s case, the bullying increases. Daddy remembers lots of fist fights because of the teasing, but hearing loss and hearing aids were just his reality. He tried hard not to let the taunting get the best of him. In the early 1960s, a hearing aid was a bulky device in your ear, weighed down with a series of wires. The wires hooked onto a metal box that fit into a shirt pocket. It was an extremely visible device that was not much more than a pint-sized amplifier. It was better than nothing but far from today’s models.
My grandmother tells the story that, one day, Daddy jumped down out of the tree he had climbed. On the way down, a small branch snagged the wires of the hearing aid. He made it to the ground, but the device stayed in the tree. Not having easy access to another hearing aid or the money to afford another one on a whim, my grandmother surprised my dad when she scaled that tree herself to save “his ears.”
Time passed, and Dad learned to channel the frustration of his hearing loss into sports. If there were extra-curricular sports offered at school, he played them: football, basketball, and track. Of the three, track hurdles became his love. Other than the need to hear the firing of the starting pistol, sound wasn’t required. He could run like the wind and jump like a gazelle, no hearing necessary. He excelled so much in track he was offered a collegiate track scholarship, which he took, and he made the most of it. It was as if his profound hearing loss disappeared when he ran, and he could answer the naysayers with pure athletic ability. He still marks that time in his life as one full of memories and self-discovery he wouldn’t trade for anything.
After graduating from college, Daddy became the father of three girls. As girls do, they grew into teenagers who bicker constantly. I remember him saying one time, in a moment of fatherly frustration, that he used to ask God why He allowed his hearing loss. Then, he realized that with three daughters, it was actually a blessing. When my sisters and I would really go at it, we would see Daddy reach up and turn the volume down on his hearing aids so he didn’t have to listen to the drama. It worked out well for him; I suppose.
Over the years, Daddy went to several audiologists and was fitted for hearing aids that improved as technology advanced. He was always grateful for the evolution of hearing devices, but because of the level of his hearing loss, the technology never came close to giving him the ability to hear like the average person. He always wanted more. In 2017, Daddy began seeing Dr. Kelly Pack, AuD, an audiologist at Professional Hearing Services of Texarkana. There were some guys at work who had seen her for hearing evaluations, and he thought he’d give her a try.
Kelly is a person who has answered her calling in life. She quotes Helen Keller saying, “Blindness separates us from things, but deafness separates us from people.” She says people with hearing loss naturally converse less with others. This, in turn, can cause a very isolated existence. When those with a hearing disability are forced to attempt to catch an entire conversation, through an environment that is often full of background noise and too many conversations going on at one time, it can be very taxing, frustrating, and tiresome. An overworked brain that is continually trying to understand speech and sound doesn’t work efficiently over time. Dr. Pack explains that many times, people with an unchecked hearing loss withdraw from life just to avoid conversation. To add to the isolation, brain cells shrink due to lack of stimulation (conversation), including the parts of the brain that receive and process sound. Hearing and the treatment of a hearing loss play a very important role in cognitive ability.
Dr. Pack and her new partner, Dr. Stephanie Wintrell, work tirelessly to diminish the stigma surrounding hearing loss and hearing aids. Ten years ago, the average patient seeking hearing services was 75 years old, as expected. Today, because of advances in technology and efficiency, the average age of their patients is around 55 years old. These vibrant, working, productive 55-year-olds have a lot of life left and are paying attention to the fact that their hearing is not quite what it used to be. They crave that unhindered social aspect of their life, so they seek audiology treatments earlier. Because modern hearing aids are miniscule and there are well-trained experts like Dr. Pack and Dr. Wintrell available to guide patients through the process, those with hearing loss, great or small, can stay connected.
These audiologists they are trying to do more than just sell hearing aids. With science, technology, and goal-oriented outcomes, they are trying to provide the gold standard of care. Professional Hearing Services offers annual hearing exams to track the level of loss. Computers, sound booths, and modern audiometers are used for testing and the REAL ear measurement system is used to correctly program hearing aids. Aside from testing, Dr. Pack and Dr. Wintrell also support the community with custom parts and ear molds for hearing aid patients. Keeping their services local so that patients don’t have to travel to bigger cities is of key importance to them. They take pride in knowing their services and abilities to reconnect people to the world of clearer sound can be a complete game changer.
A few years ago, Dr. Pack fitted my dad for a set of hearing aids that used blue tooth to connect to his phone. It was a far cry from the pocket-sized amplifier he used as a child. Still, Daddy wanted more. About a year ago, Dr Pack tested him and discovered he had only 16% of speech recognition in his left ear and 50% of speech recognition in his right ear. With age alone, those percentages were going to decrease, making his profound hearing loss elevate to complete deafness. Dr. Pack told him he would be a great candidate for a cochlear implant and that Medicare would pay for the device in one ear.
My daddy is a researcher, so before giving a definitive yes or no answer about the cochlear implant, he researched the surgeon, the device, the procedure itself, the recovery time, and the post-op exercises that would be expected of him to bring both his senses of hearing and cognition together. Last spring, Dad was still on the fence. The challenge was that he would be completely deaf in his left ear for about a month after surgery, and it would take about six months of programming and adjustments to reach optimal hearing while still wearing a hearing aid in his right ear. The brain would have to retrain itself to process sound, something his brain hadn’t done in 65 years. There were no guarantees.
One day, while sitting in the porch swing with Daddy and listening to him talk about the pros and cons of it all, I asked, “If ten-year-old Jim, who could hear almost nothing, was given the chance to hear the world around him with a cochlear implant, would he do it?” “In a heartbeat,” he said. Shortly thereafter, he called Dr. Pack and told her he was up for the challenge.
A series of more tests (hurdles, as he liked to call them) were performed to qualify Dad for the procedure, but on September 23, 2022, Dr. Jacob Hunter at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, placed a cochlear implant in his left ear. The doctor also placed a magnet just under the scalp to hold the headpiece in place so that sound could be transmitted to the internal device. The medical team had to allow for the swelling to go down at the surgical site. Therefore, it would be almost a month before Dr. Pack would activate the implant in her Texarkana office. Daddy had to depend on the hearing aid in his right ear and his lip-reading expertise to get him by until the day of activation.
On October 18, 2022, my mother and I got to bear witness to my dad hearing clear sound through that left ear for the first time since 1957. Using a computer to transmit sound through the cochlear implant, Dr. Pack adjusted the sound levels of the individual electrodes on the implant. It was an amazing and emotional moment I’ll never forget. Since then, he has had to adapt to sound at levels that seem loud to him because he has heard nothing at a normal volume. Dad told me last week, “I can hear the clock on the wall ticking. I’ve never heard that sound before!” He has been dedicated to the exercises that require to him read out loud several times a day. It is a way that he can hear himself say words while his brain processes what is simultaneously being said and heard, increasing his speech recognition daily.
My dad doesn’t take much for granted in this life. Having to deal with a profound hearing loss over his almost 70 years has brought him much strength and wisdom, all while overcoming these obstacles with the humblest of hearts. I am thankful this holiday season that my grandparents are still alive to see their boy regain his sense of hearing all these years later. They are so excited for him and watching their excitement is a blessing.
Daddy spends his time watching his son-in-law and grandson coach their high school basketball teams. He’s able to hear the screeching of gym shoes on the floor and the referees blow their whistles. Those basic sounds are new experiences for him. He also enjoys frequent trips to the lake where he fishes for anything that will bite. Though Jim Stanley has spent a lifetime wishing he had the gift of hearing, he says he actually still enjoys the quietness of daybreak at Wright Patman Lake. He takes in the sunrise, prays for his family, and feels peace all around him. I told you those muddy waters had healing powers.
