Partially Deaf Woman’s New Implant Is ‘Life-Changing’

Tina Erickson is a registered nurse who lives in Buffalo, New York. When she’s not caring for others as a nurse, Tina enjoys spending time with her husband, 16-year-old son, 12-year-old daughter and the family’s three dogs.

In the third grade, Tina was diagnosed with single-sided deafness on her left side. Because Tina has had zero percent hearing in her left ear since that diagnosis, she’s never been a candidate for a traditional hearing aid.

Living with hearing loss is often a struggle due to the daily communication problems it causes. Like many people who are severely hearing-impaired, Tina’s hearing loss took a toll on her mental health.

“I frequently couldn’t hear people clearly enough to understand what they were saying, so I’d often just give up on trying to understand them,” Tina says. “As a result, people thought I was ignoring them, and I felt isolated much of the time.”

Adding to the problem, when she was younger, Tina’s embarrassment about her hearing loss prevented her from speaking up about the problem, which only worsened her feelings of isolation.

As she grew into adulthood, Tina periodically visited hearing specialists to find out if there were any new advances in hearing assistance technology that might help her. At one point, she tried a CROS (contralateral routing of signals) hearing aid system, which consists of a microphone placed on the "bad" ear that picks up sounds on that side of the head. Those sounds are then delivered to a hearing aid fitted on the “good" ear. Unfortunately, the CROS system didn’t work well for Tina.

“It made me confused, because I couldn’t tell what direction sounds were coming from,” she says. “That type of hearing assistance works for some people. I just couldn’t get used to it.”

In 2024, Tina grew excited when a hearing specialist she visited in Buffalo informed her she was a candidate for a cochlear implant – a surgically implanted device that replaces the function of a damaged cochlea, the snail-shaped organ in the inner ear that helps people hear. However, after doing her own research and visiting another specialist for a second opinion, Tina was told that she was not a candidate for a cochlear implant.

Disappointed and frustrated, she went back to the drawing board and did some more of her own research, which eventually led her to the website of University Hospitals Ear, Nose & Throat Institute’s Audiology & Cochlear Implant Center. There she learned that University Hospitals’ cochlear implantation program is among the top ten programs in the country for total number of cochlear implants performed annually. Tina then scheduled an appointment with University Hospitals to get yet another option on her hearing assistance options.

On the day of her appointment, she and her family piled into the car and made the four-hour drive from Buffalo to Cleveland, where she met with University Hospitals otolaryngologist and neurotologist Sarah Mowry, MD. Based on a thorough assessment of Tina’s hearing loss, Dr. Mowry informed Tina she was a good candidate for the Oticon Sentio bone anchored hearing system (BAHS).

Different from a traditional cochlear implant, this type of hearing system uses the body’s natural ability to hear sounds through vibration. The Oticon Sentio system features an external sound processor that picks up sound and transforms it into vibrations inside a small implant that sits hidden beneath the skin behind one ear. Magnets hold the processor in place over the implant. From the implant, vibrations travel through the bones of the skull directly to the inner ear, where the person hears them as sound. For patients with single-sided deafness, the implant is placed on the “bad” side so that sound travels through the bone to the “good” ear.

Before committing to it, Tina was able to experience what the Oticon Sentio system sounded like by wearing an adjustable softband on her head that day. A sound processor is attached to the softband and sits behind the affected ear.

“We went for a ride that afternoon to try out the softband,” Tina says. “Normally when I’m driving in a car – especially with the windows down and the air conditioning and music on – I struggle to hear people speak clearly over the competing noise. But while I was sitting in the front passenger seat with my husband driving, I was amazed when I clearly heard my son say, ‘Mom?’ behind me and off to the left – from my deaf side.”

After Tina decided to go with the Oticon Sentio system, Dr. Mowry scheduled her to have minimally invasive surgery in August 2024 to fit the implant behind her left ear. Taking less than an hour, Tina’s procedure went very smoothly. Afterward, with her implant not yet activated, Tina returned home to Buffalo to let the implant site heal for a few weeks. She then returned to Cleveland in September to have her implant activated.

“The results have been life-changing,” Tina says. “The new sound I hear with my implant feels very natural. Not only do I hear better now, my overall awareness of my surroundings is enhanced. At work, I feel a lot less stressed because I no longer have to use so much effort and mental energy to try to understand people speaking.”

Tina is extremely grateful to Dr. Mowry, her audiologist – Katie Strange-Gierlach, AUD, CCC-A – along with the rest of her care team at University Hospitals.

“After struggling for so long to find someone to help me, I’m so glad I found the UH ENT Institute,” she says. “Not only was everyone there caring and knowledgeable, they explained things to me more clearly than anyone else ever had, which made me feel confident and calm throughout the entire process.”