Welcome waves

Not long after my processors were switched on, I held up a conch shell to one of the coils to see if I could hear the sound of the waves. Nope. I hadn’t really expected it to work, anyway. I think that captured sound has more to do with the vacuum that’s created when you hold the shell to your outer ear and block the ear canal. I’ve always loved the sound of the waves and would forever listen to the sound through conch shells during winter, waiting impatiently for summer to begin when I could hear them for real.

I’ve always found that sound so relaxing! Must date back to years ago, spending summers down at my uncle’s holiday house and falling asleep to the waves in the distance. I love the rhythm, the repetition … the way a random wave will come crashing out of nowhere before the calmer pattern resumes again. Just like life, really.

The last time I heard waves properly, ie with normal hearing, was our honeymoon in QLD back in 2006. I remember having lunch at a café on Hamilton Island and listening to that beautiful sound only metres away from us.

The next time I went to the beach was October 2008. It was Newport Beach, California. But I was almost totally deaf on that trip, putting up with moments of sound and moments of quiet. I hadn’t been fitted with hearing aids at that point. Jase and I sat on the Balboa Pier near the shoreline. I watched the waves crashing with a huge smile on my face, happy just to see them, but hear them? Nope. I was fighting just to hear Jason’s voice beside me, let alone sounds at a distance.

I went to the beach one more time during those silent years. We spent an afternoon in Nice, France, where we sat near the shore eating ice-cream and taking in the atmosphere. I was 100% deaf in the left ear by then, so no hearing aid on that side. The right ear was fitted with an aid but it was also too deaf to benefit much from it. I heard a steady static sound in the background, but nothing that resembled the pattern of the waves I was watching. The sound was lost amongst the rest of the background noise.

I’ve been patiently sitting through Melbourne’s erratic weather, waiting for an opportunity to hear the waves bionically. (Don’t you love how all the hot days are normally on weekdays and the rainy days are on weekends?) I finally got my chance to hear them again on Sunday! We took the new car for a drive down to the ocean beach at Sorrento – a very dear place to us both because it’s where Jason proposed to me. Being 7 months pregnant though, I did suggest we skip our tradition of climbing the steps to the clifftop lookout where he proposed. Just this once. ;-)

When I first got out of the car, I thought I was hearing the sound of distant traffic. It wasn’t until we got closer, made our way down the ramp to the beach itself, that I realised it wasn’t traffic at all – it was the waves!

So how do bionic waves sound? To me, they were pretty much identical to the real thing! The only difference was that they sounded more distant than I remembered them sounding with natural hearing. I had to listen to them a little more closely because the sound of the waves was competing with all of the sounds on the beach around me. Basically, I had to tell my brain which sound to focus on in order to get the best clarity, that’s all. I possibly could have increased the sensitivity settings on the processor to hear the waves a little louder, come to think of it, but I was enjoying all the other nearby summer beach sounds too. Even the seagulls!  I loved hearing the sounds of the kids along the shoreline giggling and shrieking every time a wave would knock them over!

That one day of sound completely made up for all those lost summers. I can’t thank enough Professor Graeme Clark, Cochlear, the Bionic Ear Institute and everyone else who works on this incredible technology, for bringing this sound back to my ‘ears’. Hearing that one simple sound, the waves, unlocked a treasure trove of happy memories for me – annual family summers spent at Rye or Indented Head, day trips to Black Rock and Elwood Beach as children and, later, summers spent at the beach with Jase, the day I fell in love with him, the day he proposed … our honeymoon.

So many of my happiest memories include the sound of the waves. And, as Jase and I start dreaming of future family holidays at the beach already, I bet so many more moments can feature the waves now too.