NEWS PHOTO KELLEN TANIGUCHI
Robyn Vance-Halvorson and her husband Jeremy Halvorson sit on their living room couch and discuss how Robyn's hearing has improved since her surgery.
ktaniguchi@medicinehatnews.com@@kellentaniguchi
When COVID-19 arrived and masks became mandatory, Robyn Vance-Halvorson was afraid she would lose her job in long-term care. The 35-year-old suffers from hereditary hearing loss on her mother’s side and relied on reading lips to engage in conversation.
“I struggled and wondered if I’d still have a job because asking co-workers to remove their masks, I work with wonderful staff, but that would be asking them to break the rules by removing their mask,” she said.
On June 23 everything changed for Vance-Halvorson – she received cochlear implant surgery as part of the Adult Cochlear Implant Service program located at the Richmond Road Diagnostic and Treatment Centre in Calgary. She described her hearing loss as a sensory neural loss where the brain doesn’t receive the signal it should.
One month later, the centre switched on Vance-Halvorson’s implant and now she says her life has changed “360 degrees.”
She says once the processor was switched on sounds were intense, but she was able to adjust quickly. She adds she almost immediately could understand her co-workers as long as she knew the context of the conversation, or she initiated the conversation and they responded with yes or no answers.
“I was doing really well and within two weeks I was noticing I could understand more and more staff conversations better and now I”m at the point where I just have a select few staff members who talk to fast,” she said with a laugh.
Before she was accepted into the program, Vance-Halvorson had to take part in a series of interviews and testing to see if she would qualify for the program, which has limited space. She says only eight adults are accepted each year and everything is covered by Alberta Health.
Vance-Halvorson and her husband Jeremy Halvorson sat down with a woman who had gone through the program before as part of the process, and that’s when she started to believe the surgery might be right for her.
“She received her implant five years prior but everything about her communication wise just seemed so routine, you wouldn’t know she spent her entire childhood and most of her adult life hearing impaired – everything seemed normal,” said Vance-Halvorson.
After her implant was switched on, Vance-Halvorson was taken to a sound booth where audio of different men and women was played and she was asked to identify any consonant, syllable, word she recognized, or if she recognized the entire phrase.
“In the first day she got switched on she went into the sound booth and scored zero per cent, which basically by clinical definition is deaf,” said Jeremy.
He added that she scored a 33 per cent in November and most recently on April 1, Vance-Halvorson scored a 70 per cent in the booth.
Now, she is hearing sounds she hasn’t heard in her lifetime and even sounds from a distance.
“The other day when I was walking into the grocery store, there was a gentleman on the other side of the parking lot and he had a fob in his hand and was locking his vehicle and I heard the beep, two times,” said Vance-Halvorson.
Throughout her time learning new vocabulary, her three-year-old son Henrik was learning alongside her. She says her son is patient and they explain to him that she can’t hear without her hearing device on. The device goes above her ear and a magnet attaches to the implant device where a coil transmits information.
Vance-Halvorson’s goal was to be able to book her own appointments and be able to communicate on the phone and that’s exactly what she does now.
A couple of months ago, she said Henrik wanted to call his grandfather and tell him what was on his birthday list. She made the call and her dad took a while to answer at first.
“My dad texted me later and said, ‘I’m sorry I took so long to answer, I just couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t talked to my daughter on the phone in 20 something years, she’s actually calling me,” she said.
Vance-Halvorson says the clinic believes she’s the first person from Medicine Hat to have the surgery in the program and she hopes to bring more awareness and show people there are ways to get help.
