william	The surgery was a very straight forward operation. You go into an operating theatre they’ll give you a general anaesthetic. It feels great because you just feel very warm and comfortable and then before you know it you’re out like a light. In the operating theatre what they do is they cut into the inner ear, they make a small opening, they open up the skin and then what they have to do it dig a trough and that’s into the sole so they can put the device through. And what they do is they drill a hole and this hole actually goes through to the inner ear. And it actually goes between two very important nerves: one that controls your taste; and one that controls your facial expression. So they actually drill between those nerves and they’ll insert electrodes into the cochlear. Then they’ll test if it works, then they’ll stitch me back up and send me away again. But the funny thing is that when I had this operation the student nurse who came in with me the first thing I saw her was the face, the student nurse looked white as a sheet and when I woke up I said, “Are you okay?” And that was the first thing that I said. 	
kate	Oh my goodness. So you let somebody drill into your skull and into your brain! What? Why would anyone do that? 	
william	It doesn’t actually go into your brain, it goes to your inner ear. It is a very sensitive area and there are lots of risks involved. But when I woke up I felt fine, I was very happy. I could taste everything okay. They’d actually brought me a plate of fish & chips and that was the best fish & chips I’ve ever had in my life. 	
rob	And so you wait for a month after it’s been installed before it’s activated, is that right? 	
william	Yes that’s right. You have to actually give your body time to heal and that’s why they wait a month. And also you might have some kind of side effects like balance. I actually recovered quite quickly. The first week yeah I did feel some pain, I couldn’t really turn my head left or right and I couldn’t move my head that well. But after one week I would say I was feeling normal again. Going into the switch on that day I was feeling quite nervous, feeling very scared because it’s D-day, you know whether or not it was the right decision. 	
rob	This must have been an absolutely incredible day in your life. I just cannot imagine what must have been going through your mind. So is it right to say before the switch on you couldn’t hear anything at all? 	
william	Well that’s not quite true. Let me clarify. Before the switch on I was still wearing my hearing aids. I was wearing my hearing aids in my right ear and I could hear quite well with that hearing aid. But in the last two or three years I’ve noticed I’m becoming more deaf. I’ve always been profoundly deaf which meant my hearing was very limited but in the last two or three years I was losing a little bit more of that residual hearing that I had. And I was losing that bit of edge that was making me feel a bit more comfortable. So before that point I did have a hearing aid and when I went to the audiologist appointment I gave in my hearing aid, and she said, “Promise me you won’t wear it again.” And the reason for that is that it sounds so different when you compare it to what you can hear with your implants. 	
kate	So talk me through what happened when you went for the switch on. Was it suddenly like you could hear everything in the world? 	
william	For a lot of deaf people the switch on is the most disappointing day of their life. 	
kate	Wow!	
william	Every person that I’ve spoken to with an implant has said it was an awful experience. There are lots of videos that you can actually see on YouTube of their switch ons, you know children, young girls, young boys being switched on and a lot of them are actually crying. A lot of them smiled but then they’re just shocked by what they can hear maybe. It’s not sound it’s beeping but it doesn’t feel like sound, it feels like some kind of electronic trigger’s going on in your brain. 	
kate	I mean why would you put yourself through it then? 	
william	Well that was a question I was asking myself just after the switch on. Every day it got better. The beeping slowly resolved itself. It started to define itself more as sound like and then a week later they turned up the volume, they gave me the booster volume. Because in the first week what they do is they keep the sound level, the volume level of your implant low because on my switch on I went as a sheet, I was shaking, it was like having a really bad trip, some kind of really bad drug experience you know how it is. 	
rob	And so it’s been a month now has it really changed your life that much or is it something that you now possibly regret having done? 	
william	I think after a month it’s far too early for me to say what the long term impact would be on my life. I still think there are a lot of things that could be positive. Things are developing really well for me at the moment so like I’m starting to identify certain sounds. I can start recognising things without actually having to look at it. Before when I had a hearing aid I would have to look and check what that sound was in order to understand it whether it was an ambulance or a dog barking. Because with a hearing aid a lot of the sounds come across the same, whereas with an implant it’s more defined and you can distinguish the different sounds. 	
rob	Well we’ve got a little bit of a test for you here; we’re going to see just how well this new…	
william	Oh dear!	
rob	…cochlear implant does work. Right we’ve got a sound effect lined up and what we’re going to do it just play it and we’re going to see if you can recognise what we’re playing you. It’s quite a phenomenally huge noise so hopefully it won’t be too overwhelming. 	
kate	No clues, Rob, no clues come on. 	
rob	No further clues. Let’s have a listen and see if you can tell us what it is. [Big Ben chiming]	
william	Okay what I’m hearing is a period of silence and then I hear a loud pulse sound, and then it’s followed by another silence and then another loud pulse it’s kind of rhythmic. I have no idea what that could be.	
kate	Any clues if I said there’s some kind of relevance to what happened two days ago from when we’re recording this podcast. 	
rob	Today being January 3rd well at the time we’re recording this I should point out.	
william	It was Big Ben wasn’t it? The bing bong. 	
rob	He got it! Bingo!	
kate	Well done. 	
rob	It was indeed Big Ben.	
william	Hooray. Great. 	
rob	But it sounds like you…we obviously heard a huge great church bell, well not a church bell but we heard a huge great clock chiming the hour. You heard a pulse. So it sounds like what you heard was probably very different to what we heard. 	
william	Well to be honest I think what people have to understand about implants is it’s an electronic stimulus; they’re using electricity to stimulate your inner ear. So a lot of people will say, for the first few months the sensations are like pulses and then in about two or three months it could be that what you’re hearing is equivalent to normal sounds that you can hear. It doesn’t always happen that way. 	
kate	So I mean there’s a lot of controversy around cochlear implants amongst deaf people isn’t there? I mean I don’t 100% understand it because isn’t giving someone an aid to help them hear again isn’t that like giving somebody who can’t see as well glasses? 	
william	I think what you have to understand about the deaf community is that there are deaf people who have grown up not believing that deafness is a disability. They consider themselves to be part of a linguistic minority. So anyone trying to impose cochlear implants when they don’t feel that they need to be fixed they then feel oppressed, they feel like they’re then being forced to do something that they don’t want to do and they’re already comfortable as they are without their hearing. 	
kate	So I mean you yourself have a baby, if your baby was in the same position as you and they were growing up deaf would you encourage them to get an implant at a much younger age, say, three or four? 	
william	That’s one question that I’m still struggling with now because my son could become deaf later in life and if he starts to become deaf then there comes a time when we have to make a decision; should we give him an implant before he becomes deaf and I don’t know what the answer to that is. Because part of me going through that operation I know it’s invasive, I know there’s lots of risks attached to it, but at the same time you want to give your child the best in life and I would like to try and give my son both, you know, I’d like my son to be part of the deaf world even if he does or doesn’t have an implant. I even know a lot of deaf parents who have decided to give their deaf child an implant. And I know lots of deaf parents who have refused to give their deaf child an implant. And I can see the argument for both sides. 	
rob	And just finally, I don’t know whether enhanced is the right word, but since you’ve had the cochlear implant do you know have a favourite noise or a noise that particularly nauseates you? 	
william	One week after I was switched on I found one of my son’s wooden drumsticks. I was using this drumstick walking round the house and tapping it on different things and it was the first time I realised that when you tap on different surfaces you actually get a different frequency of sound. So I was walking around the house just tapping things with this wooden drumstick – tapping the windows, tapping the tables and it was the first time I really understood the differences. Because with the hearing aids they compress sounds to one sound actually. So with hearing aids all you can really distinguish is volume. And this is mainly because I am a profoundly deaf person and it’s difficult for me to discriminate between pitch. So this is the first time I’m experiencing different pitch sounds as I’m walking around the house. So I’m a long way from any of this being useful to me on a day-to-day basis because I’m still learning, I’m still defining what sounds are. So I have to relearn the sounds that I know that I’ve been familiar with over the past 30 odd years because what I’m hearing now is nothing like what I could hear before it’s much better now than what I could hear. But there is still a long way for me to go yet.