Volume 27
Number 13
June 24, 2016
Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
W H AT
Joy I N
SOUND! Carolyn Sienicki started wearing hearing aids in kindergarten. Her hearing loss “affected how I learned in the classroom, the ease of forming new friendships and relationships, and how people perceived and responded to me.” After 40 years of “honed coping strategies and expensive new hearing aids” that were no longer doing the job, she decided to take the next step: getting cochlear implants. She received the first in November 2014 and the second last September. They changed her life. The “What Joy in Sound!” painting (left) she created and gifted to her surgeon, Michael Ruckenstein, MD, of Otorhinolaryngology, illustrates the difference that hearing has made.
INSIDE A Winning CANstruction..........2 ‘Above and Beyond’ Recognizes HUP’s Every Day Heroes.................................3 Two from Path & Lab Named in “40 Under Forty”.......................3 Join the 5k for the IOA and Memory Mile Walk....................4 HR Generalists Now at HUP.....4
The cochlea plays a key role in our ability to hear. Its delicate hair cells send neural signals to the brain via the auditory nerve. When these cells are damaged, no signals reach the brain. The cochlear implant comprises an internal electrode — which is surgically implanted in the cochlea — as well as an internal receiver and an external processor with a microphone.
Sound enters the implant through the microphone and travels, via special FM sound waves, into the internal receiver which sends it to the electrode. This, in turn, stimulates the auditory nerve which sends the sound to the brain stem and then the brain. Driving home after her first implant was activated, “I was waiting in traffic to turn and heard a tick-tick-tick sound,” Sienicki said. Having no idea what it was, she pulled off to the side of the road, thinking something must with wrong with the implant. The sound disappeared. She then signaled to get back on the road. There it was again. “I realized the car’s turn signal makes a sound!” she said. Activating the implant doesn’t immediately lead to perfect hearing, said Hannah Kaufman, AuD, CCC-A, coordinator of HUP’s Implantable Hearing Devices Program. “The brain has forgotten how to hear normally, to tune out sounds,” she said. “Patients become overwhelmed in a noisy environment trying to separate the speaker from the background sounds.” (continued on page 2)
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