Cochlear Implants

A cochlear implant is an electronic device that improves your hearing. These can be a good option for people with severe hearing loss or individuals that have trouble using hearing aids.

How do they work?

The cochlear implant sends sounds past the damaged part of your ear directly to your hearing nerve called the cochlear nerve. When you have a cochlear implant, you will have a sound processor that fits behind your ear that retains sound and sends it to a receiver that’s been placed under your skin behind the ear.

The receiver under your skin then sends the sound to your inner ear to trigger the cochlear nerve, which sends signals to your brain to hear as sounds. When you have a cochlear implant, you must do training with our audiologist or speech language pathologists to learn how to hear the signals as words.

Cochlear Implant Surgery

Our audiologist, Michael Lazarczyk, AuD, will connect you to our Ear, Nose and Throat surgeons for an expert level of care for your cochlear implant surgery. Normally, this is a same-day procedure under anesthesia where Justin Oltman, MD, or Eric Rohe, MD, will:

• make a small incision behind your ear and open the mastoid bone.
• make a divot for the internal device to sit in so you don’t have a bump behind your ear.
• open your cochlea, which is a bone inside your inner ear that is connected to your cochlear nerve.
• gently guide the electrodes from the internal device into your cochlea.
• close your incision with a few small stitches.

After Surgery

Two to four weeks after surgery, you will follow up with our audiologist to activate the external part of the cochlear implant. He will help program the device and continue to meet with you to fine-tune the settings to ensure you are hearing to the best of your ability.