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As Ginger just said, my name is Liz Charitonuk and similar to DeeDee I had my one year hearing
birthday September 4th so I’ve had my Baha for one year and it has truly been a journey.
DeeDee said to, ya know, say what was my life like before my Baha. In between, I got married,
had 2 children, they get--all of them get frustrated with me. Mom, mom, mom, If I’m
on the phone with my good ear, on the phone, they say something on my bad side, I don’t
hear them. The TV is always too loud. As I said, I’m a nurse and I work in an emergency
department or I did for 23 years, I’m now teaching. So, I learned to adapt as all of
us did, I think because I started with hearing loss early, I read lips, inadvertently, no
one taught me. I did all the speech therapy in elementary school, “Sandy Snake” and
all my S’s and all that jazz. But it had gotten to the point that I was noticing that
I probably was having trouble in the department. If we had physicians that were soft spoken,
I would have trouble hearing them. I had to turn and automatically put them on my right
side. My family and friends all walked on my right side. And they know. We did try hearing
aids and that was miserable… miserable. So last —a year ago May-- we decided to
go through the Baha surgery. And I live in Maryland, just so you know, I live in Hampstead
so it was up in GBMC. The surgery itself was a piece of cake. Ya know, you’ve had multiple
ear surgeries, many of us have, went in in the afternoon had a late surgery, went home,
took my pain medicine so I would sleep. Took Tylenol on Friday. Saturday and Sunday I did
what I normally did and Monday back at work. I had to wait 12 weeks and then September
4th they hooked me up. I have a BP100. And Ginger was there. I was the first one in my
ENT’s office to get the BP100. So they were learning the programming as I was learning
the Baha. And the first thing I noticed, and I think Ginger looked at me and and, I’m
looking and I’m going like this and I couldn’t figure out what the noise was. It was the
vent, it was tweaked it until it was good. The longer it’s gone on, the hearing has
become so natural that I have now, I walked out the door to work without it. Because I
don’t realize I don’t have it on until I don’t hear something. I’ve gone to bed
and gone to lay down and gotten a rude awakening when it’s squeals at me cause I’ve forgotten
to take it off. My husband and I are now trying to get our exercise and trying to drop some
weight and do our thing. And we were walking. We have a track near our house and we were
walking. I found myself and was walking and not paying attention, we had to, ya know,
go single sided, people were coming the other way. I am now putting my husband on my left
side. And he looked at me and I said, “John, do you realize what I’ve just done?” The
entire time we’ve known each other he’s always had to walk on my right side. The hearing
is now that I can put him on either side. And actually now my Baha ear is my good ear.
And my right ear is the one that doesn’t give me tons of trouble. That’s my story.
I am, ya know, glad to talk to anyone who has questions.