Thrilled to finally hear again
Intricate Procedure Restores Geneva Professor's Hearing
(Reprinted with the permission of the Beaver County Times)

By: April Johnston -
Beaver County Times Staff
02/21/2005

When English professor Lynn Fairfield started asking her soft-spoken students at Geneva College to repeat themselves during class and began missing the punch lines to her colleagues' jokes during meetings, she had no doubt what was happening:

Her nerves were slowly disintegrating and would eventually leave her near deaf.

It had already happened to her great-grandfather - a ship's captain forced to retire when the bells that helped him navigate in and out of West Coast harbors faded into silence. It had happened to her father, too, who grudgingly retired from teaching at 50 when he could no longer understand his students.

"I was determined not to retire early," said Fairfield, 59, a New England native who now lives in Brighton Township.

So her husband got online and searched for doctors who would experiment with modern or alternative treatments for hearing loss. He found the Pittsburgh Ear Associates at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh.

There, Drs. Douglas Chen and Moises Arriaga were involved in a Phase I study to test the Envoy Middle Ear Implantable System, a first-of-its-kind, completely implantable device that uses the body's middle ear to receive and process sound, instead of simply amplifying outside sound like conventional hearing aids.

The result, according to Arriaga, is a cleaner sound.

Their office was one of only two test sites in the nation.

At her first appointment in 2001, Chen told Fairfield she might make a good candidate for the study. She was younger than most hearing loss patients, was in good health and was equally deaf in both ears.

But she would have to wait three years to participate, when Phase II of the study began.

While she waited, Fairfield became even more convinced she wanted to try the device. Her hearing worsened and conventional hearing aids, while helpful, annoyingly amplified noise as well as voices. When Fairfield was in the classroom, air conditioners shrieked like train whistles and furnaces clanked like tractor trailers traveling rough roads.

Eventually, she gave up classroom teaching to develop curriculum for Geneva's Degree Completion Program.

Chen and Arriaga finally implanted the hearing system during an intricate, four-hour surgery last September. They hollowed out a small portion of Fairfield's skull behind her left ear to make room for the bean-shaped device, 1 ½ inches in diameter and a quarter-inch thick. Then they ran two wires from the device to sensors in her middle ear, allowing sound waves to move easily from one to the other.

All of it rests below the skin, under Fairfield's chin-length brown hair, making it invisible to the eye.

In November, Chen turned on the system, officially making Fairfield the first patient in the Phase II study.

She was immediately thrilled with the results.

"I could hear my coffee sloshing in the cup," she said with a grin. "When my husband and I went for our walks I could hear the birds and dogs."

Fairfield can't walk through metal detectors at airports, have a Magnetic Resonance Imaging test or swim in deep water with the system, but she is free to do nearly everything else she can think of. Plus, she doesn't have to fiddle with a clunky gadget behind her left ear. (She still wears a conventional hearing aid in her right ear.)

"I'm delighted with the results both professionally and personally,"
Fairfield said. She has begun co-teaching classes in the Degree Completion Program and hopes to teach online classes as well.

In fact, the only complaint she has about the system is the remote control that allows her to adjust the volume and turn it on or off.

"It's like the thing in my head is Bose and the remote is Victrola," she said with a chuckle.

Arriaga and Chen have been equally pleased with Fairfield's progress. She has achieved 25 decibels of gain, or useable amplification, so far and should realize more as her brain adapts to the technology.

Conventional hearing aids, by contrast, typically allow 15 to 20 decibels of gain.

Though the study requires the doctors to monitor Fairfield's progress for just one year, Arriaga said, given her success, they'll likely observe her much longer.

"She is just beginning to realize the possibilities," he said.