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 Last spring, Patsy Jordan had a cochlear implant performed at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. The procedure allows her to hear — and learn to decide — the sounds of life. Roger Werth / The Daily News
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Cochlear implant opens world of hearing to Longview woman
Sunday, October 19, 2008 9:41 AM PDT
By Cathy Zimmerman
Printable version
E-mail this articleIn the kitchen the other day, Patsy Jordan couldn’t find a noise. She searched all over the place, finally giving up. “I went and got my grandchild,” said Jordan, a 60-year-old mother of three and grandmother of five. “He said, ‘That’s the bacon, Grandma.’ ”
Jordan grinned and made the ffft-ffft sound of grease in a pan.
“All I hear is sounds. I’m like a baby.”
The Longview woman, whose voice still carries a hint of the hoarse, furry dialect of deaf people who speak, was born with profound hearing loss and was completely deaf by the age of 12.
She has never heard Beethoven or the Beatles, a church bell or a bird. She doesn’t know a train whistle, the Star Spangled Banner or the crackle of a fire.
“The last sound I remember hearing was a plane going over the house .. .”
That was in 1960. It would be 48 years until she would experience sound again.
Last April, Jordan had a cochlear implant at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. With the device, she can communicate much more clearly with her clients and hear her children’s voices for the first time.
The cochlea is the part of the inner ear that contains auditory nerve endings. A cochlear implant, placed through surgery, has parts that go inside and outside the ear. Outside, the deaf person wears an apparatus with a microphone, a speech processor and a transmitter.
The transmitter takes the signals and feeds them to a piece that is inside the skin, slightly behind the ear — the receiver. The receiver “turns the signal to electrical impulses,” Jordan said, and those impulses pass to an electrode array in the inner ear, or cochlea. The electrodes collect the impulses and send them to the auditory nerve.
What she hears is close to the original speech sound, she said, “but it’s not possible for any implant to make sounds completely natural.” The National Institute on Deafness describes it as a “useful representation.”
Ultimately, only Jordan knows how it sounds. And she’s the one who must learn, like a baby, to sort and decode the blizzard of noises the world makes.
California, minus a sound track
“When you ask me where home is, it’s California, Pennsylvania, Texas,” said Jordan, a self-described military brat who grew up the only girl in a family of six boys.
“Most of my schooling was in Long Beach, California. My first two years were in a Catholic school. The sister told my father ‘She’s not getting anything. Put her in a school for her own kind.’ ”
There was no school for the deaf at that time, but actor Spencer Tracy had founded the John Tracy Clinic in honor of his deaf son. “I went there,’ Jordan said. “A taxi cab came and picked me up every morning.
“There was no signing, just lip reading and speaking. Instead of science and math and P.E., we read lips. In the classroom, on the playground, we weren’t supposed to sign.
“Lip reading came natural to me,” she said. “That’s how my parents learned that I was deaf,” when they discovered — she was not yet 2 — that she had been lip reading. She was so good at it and quick to respond in class that Jordan was made to stand where she couldn’t see the teacher’s face, “because otherwise, none of the other kids got a chance.”
Jordan’s mother told her, early on, that she could deal with a deaf daughter, “but I want you to speak.”
Patricia Vinion took the task on herself.
“We were very close,’ Jordan said. “It was just us. We had a lot of laughs.”
Her mother taught her to say each word, syllable by syllable. Jordan smiled remembering how hard it was to say the “ch” sound, how tricky to figure out where the emphasis went in a big word. “For pedestrian, I would say ped-es-TAR-ian.”
After 8th grade, the only option was a residential school. “My mother said, ‘You can’t go away; you need to take care of the boys.’ So I dropped out of school.”
In her teens, her brothers would lip-sync songs and try to get her to hear a steel guitar. Her mother bought her an accordion. “I couldn’t hear it, but I could feel it.”
Jordan waitressed for three years, got married, had three kids. Blinking lights alerted her to fire alarms, doorbells, phones and alarm clocks. With her infant daughter sleeping next to her bed, she tied a ribbon around the baby’s wrist, then connected it to her own wrist.
“When babies cry, they move,” she explained.
She was a young mother of 23 when her husband died. “He was working under a car and it fell on him,” Jordan said.
“A year later, I married one of his Navy buddies. Eight days later, he died in a motorcycle accident. I said, ‘That’s it for me.’ “ Jordan has not remarried.
‘You have a history’
She worked and the kids got older. When her mother moved to Longview, Jordan missed her, so she moved to the area, too. She went first to the unemployment office, where workers sent her to the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. At DVR, “They told me, ‘You don’t even have a GED.’ “
Bummed out, Jordan returned to familiar territory in San Diego, but eventually she moved north again. At Lower Columbia College, she got a GED and enrolled in the Administration of Justice program.
“I always cared about the underdog. I wanted to work in the social side of the law, in prevention instead of picking up the pieces in rehabilitation.”
The life of a deaf person is marked by isolation, Jordan said. She was “extremely shy,” nervous about being in classes with people half her age and always trailed by an interpreter and a note taker.
One of her instructors would not allow her to retreat from the dialogue, she said. “He told me, You have a lot to teach these students. You have a history.”
After graduating from LCC and earning a B.A. at Linfield College, Jordan did end up on the rehab end, working in the offenders re-entry program. It burned her out in five years.
“The revolving door is hard to deal with,” she said. “Young people don’t realize that the people are still out there who used to do drugs with them. A couple of people have been killed when they came out. They got shot.
“When you grow these people and see them doing well, and then you lose them ...” Her voice faded. “I asked if I could be a case manager again, and work in the disabled community.”
She’s been at the Goodwill Vocational Services for 11 years. As a case manager, she places disabled adults in jobs at Safeway, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Target and Fred Meyer.
“We meet people that need help,” she said. “If their parents are with them, they choose me, because they know I’ve been there. I will take care of their children. And the people with disabilities think, ‘I can be like Patsy. I can be independent.’
Sounding out a new life
Jordan first read about cochlear implants 20 years ago.
“They made a hole in your temple and snapped it in there,” she said. That alarmed one of her brothers. “He told me, ‘You don’t want to do that! It might damage your brain.’ So I forgot about it.”
Years later, a client who had the implants came in to Goodwill.
“She took them off and showed them to me,” Jordan said. “Still, I put it off for a year. What if I turned out to not be a good candidate? I was afraid.”
Finally she went in to be tested. The Kaiser doctor told her she’d be an excellent candidate, in part because her expectations were not unrealistically high, but focused on a simple goal.
“I told him I wanted to bring sound in with my lip reading, so I could understand people better. Communicating is what I do.”
In April, she had the surgery at Oregon Health Sciences University. Insurance covered the procedure, which costs $50,000 for each ear. Jordan chose to do only one ear, she said.
There was soreness after the surgery, but the worse pain was emotional, she said.
“The first time I tried to get the surgery, my mom was still alive.” When pre-surgery medication didn’t work, “we had to put it off. My mother died before I had the surgery. I never heard her voice.”
After decades as a deaf person, though, Jordan has learned to look on the bright side.
The surgery caused the right side of her face to sag as if she had a had a stroke. “I know my mother wouldn’t have been able to handle that,” she said. “So I don’t mind that I didn’t hear her.”
Her facial muscles have regained tone. And, as Jordan had hoped, conversations are becoming more and more clear.
“I’m so happy to sit here and have a conversation with you without an interpreter!” she told a reporter.
She still reads lips, but now, she said, “there’s no doubt about what people are saying.” Soon, she hopes to use a telephone without using the TTY interpreter.
To practice listening without those any props, she has her grandkids read stories while she closes her eyes to “try and get what they’re saying. It’s frustrating, but I realize it’s going to take time. I have to be patient.”
Jordan doesn’t like to go without the processor, the exterior piece of the implant. She’s afraid she’ll lose the device, she said. But on Fridays after work, she doffs the earpiece along with her shoes and work clothes.
“I get comfortable. I just sit there for a while. Sorry, but if you could take off your hearing sometimes, you would too.”
Chasing sound
“A big misconception,” Jordan said, ‘is people think, ‘Aha, she can hear.’ “
She has to learn not only to match spoken sounds to lip movement — which was always an inexact science -- but deal with the interference of a world that’s suddenly turned on the volume.
“I’m hearing sounds I didn’t know existed before,” she said. “I’m like a child, exploring life. It’s hard to get used to a toilet flushing! In public rest rooms, when there’s more than one — it’s a roar.”
There’s plenty to celebrate, however.
Jordan’s daughter, Tina Greve, 28, works with her mother at Goodwill.
“She can hear us laughing now,” Greve said. “Because we deal with so many issues around barriers to employment, humor is essential in this line of work. Now, she can join in.”
Her mother used to drop keys or watches, but never before could hear them drop. “Now, she stops and looks around. She doesn’t lose them.”
There were sounds Jordan had long wanted to hear. After the implant, she headed straight for the beach, she said.
“The ocean is huge and vast and rolling, but it didn’t make as much noise as I expected,” she said.
“I like the rain. I sat in the car and listened.”
What is the absolute best thing she has heard?
“The voices of my children,” she said immediately. It was the only time she teared up.
Swiftly, Jordan moved on. “I always wondered what I had missed, not hearing my children cry. Standing by the fax machine with my daughter the other day, she told me a baby was crying.
“I said, ‘C’mon! I want to hear that baby.’
“Of course, the mother let me hold him.”
Having held the wailing infant, Jordan said — making a little face — “it’s not so great.”
What is also awaiting her, after 60 years, is a complex bundle of sounds that brings universal pleasure: music.
“I would like to hear the sound of a piano or a guitar,” she said. “I love the sound of a saxophone! I need to go the music department at a school and say, ‘Let me hear this instrument,’ one at a time.
Maybe in the future, she’ll try a live musical or symphony performance, she said. For now, she has arranged for two weeks off to go to California to see — and hear — old friends and old places.
“Some people chase rainbows,” she said. “I want to chase sounds.”
One of the biggest surprises for Jordan has been discovering something that is silent. “The sun doesn’t make any noise,” she said. “It’s so big, so powerful, but it doesn’t make a sound. I couldn’t believe it.”
day2day wrote on Oct 19, 2008 7:47 AM:
Patsy, you would have loved our talk! :) "
goddesskk1 wrote on Oct 19, 2008 9:03 AM:
I was one of your note takers at Linfield and I have fond memories of you. Best wishes with your implant, your career and your life. Kathy "
k-town446 wrote on Oct 19, 2008 2:45 PM:
lspens wrote on Oct 19, 2008 6:31 PM:
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