cochlear implant & dizziness?
I am 45 and have had menieres disease since i was 23.i lost all my hearing in my right ear years ago now my left is no longer functioning well with my new and extremely powerful hearing aid.I have alot of distortion and munchkin like voices.Thus Dr. says time to consider cochlear implant.What I would like to know if someone can answer me on this is i keep seeing dizziness can occur with surgery.Has anyone experienced dizziness and is this just while healing or a long term side effect?Also I have tinnitus in both ears does the tinnitus tend to disappear or fade with the implant surgery? Is there anyone who is late in life deafend who remembers regular hearing and can tell me how the implant sounds comparetively? thanks for any input.
Tagged with: dizziness • ears • hearing aid • implant surgery • munchkin • Tinnitus • voices
Filed under: Cure for Tinnitus
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You might want to join the group AllDeaf and post this question. I am only moderately HI (should wear my aids more than I do, LOL !), but I work at a clinic with a lot of adult CI patients, and I have done insurance appeals for people who received CIs after bilateral meniere's disease. I am NOT one of the medical providers, the info below is just anecdotal evidence from people that I have worked with.
Dizziness can be a complication of any ear surgery, and CI surgery is no exception. I don't personally know of anyone who has experienced this on a permanent basis, but sometimes it can take a few months to clear up. Because you already have Meniere's disease, it might make sense to do an ENG / CDP tests *before* the surgery, so you can establish a baseline of what your current vertigo patterns look like.
From what I've heard, people with existing tinnitus frequently experience improvement in the tinnitus after implantation. The American Tinnitus Association says 1/2 of CI patients who had tinnitus before implantation had improvements in the tinnitus post implantation. Nature abhors a vacuum, when there is no sound, the auditory nerve can go nuts and create its own sound (tinnitus). Stimulating the auditory nerve by implanting a CI kills the vacuum. We did one appeal where the patient had "hallucinatory music" (a form of tinnitus) so bad that she ended up in a psychiatric institution for a while. Completely disappeared when she got the implant. Of course if your tinnitus is bilateral, you will need to be implanted bilaterally to achieve this benefit. I have heard of tinnitus being a side effect of implantation, but I think that's when patients did not have tinnitus before the implant. YMMV.
As far as late-deafened and remembering regular hearing, then going through the implantation process, I *HIGHLY* recommend Michael Chorost's book, "Rebuilt" which chronicles this process.
Sheri
P.S. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE !!!!!
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