This is my story…
My name is Doose (Doe-say). I am a Christian and I have a Cochlear Implant. I was implanted at the age of 15, 5years after losing my hearing following a 6-week battle with typhoid fever in Nigeria.
I created this blog after realising through a number of other CI users how much I have truly limited my CI experience and the CI itself, beginning with a lack of interest/awareness in my hearing and its development post-CI in the early days. This year, I became familiar with a number of other users and their experiences through their blogging and I was convicted of one powerful truth, so powerful that when it hit me this morning, I had the wind knocked out of me! I cried; I cried so hard I had to leave my desk at work to compose myself in the first aid room. This is what conviction does to you after many years of living in ignorance or failing to see the truth. I have to credit Angela’s post “Chains of Habit” for this ‘kick’. Through her writing came this conviction. Be sure to read it.
What was my conviction? I’ll come to that in a bit.
I’d always said my CI was a direct healing from God for my hearing loss suffered unexpectedly as I was about to step from childhood to adolescence. I refer to it as a miracle because the hearing it gives me by far exceeded what hearing aids (I will refer to them as HA from this point onwards) did for me in those 5yrs I was forced to use them. I say ‘forced’ because I didn’t like them and whenever I had the opportunity (usually the minute I stepped out of the house, away from my guardian’s eagle eyes), I would remove them and promptly stuff them into my school bag. To say I hated them was an understatement; I truly despised those hearing aids. That may sound shocking, but don’t be. It wasn’t always that way. In fact, when I first had HA, I was quite chuffed with them and wore them very proudly…until I resumed primary school after being off sick for 2months and I was confronted with all these curious eyes staring so intently at my head (more specifically my HA) that it felt like daggers being shoot into me. From that moment on, my love affair with HA deteriorated rapidly to a ‘hate affair’. I didn’t like being the centre of attention.
Coming to London did not help at all; you’d think HA were more common here so it would have been a case of “seen it all before” and the curious eyes would cease, right? Wrong. To make matters worse, I was teased A LOT because of my hearing loss in the first Secondary School I attended. It got so bad that I left that school after 2years and I was transferred to another school where, thankfully, the experience was better and I stayed there to complete my secondary education then on to my college years in the same school and finally moved off to university. If they had a university I’d have had it as my UCAS first choice! I will always have the fondest memories of Hendon School in North-west London and the tutors within its Hearing Impaired Unit (HIU) – I still remember all their names; they are engraved on my heart until the day my body dies. A mainstream school but it gave me the best support it could and I finished with the best grades to get into my first choice university.
So, what was my conviction? All these 12years as a CI user, I have not only denied myself by unwittingly limiting my experience with the CI, but more importantly, through this denial/ignorance/whatever you wish to call it, I have prevented others from seeing this miracle in all its wondrous glory and as a result, hidden God’s glory from others in the process.
So this is why I have created this blog with one goal in mind – to give God the glory and show the world that there is indeed a God! May He help me to do just that IJN, amen!
Come walk with me; there is so much I need to share! But please be patient with me as I embark on this new experience of blogging whilst simultaneously trying to remain watchful and sensitive to all that God wants me to share with you here.
This is my story.
Doose