I had progressive hearing loss from the age of 3, had severe hearing loss by 6, and profound hearing loss shortly thereafter. I got a cochlear implant at 16. S

I had progressive hearing loss from the age of 3, had severe hearing loss by 6, and profound hearing loss shortly thereafter. I got a cochlear implant at 16. So I wasn't Deaf, but I was certainly deaf. I'd lost my hearing at an advanced enough age to be verbal, but early enough to not really remember what I was "supposed" to be hearing. After I got my cochlear implant, the thing that surprised me (and continues to surprise me to this day) is that there was just so much noise I couldn't even have begun to imagine. "people hearing something I couldn't" was just an abstract concept, like being taller than me. If every sound were given a loudness on a scale from 1 to 10, I could only hear the 9s and 10s... but after the cochlear implant, I could hear everything from four to 10. The variety of sounds out there were just ridiculous -- I remember being startled at the sound of my mother cutting vegetables because I'd never heard a knife on a cutting board before. Even today, about 17 years later, I still find that there are lots of things I can hear but not categorize. I thought my coworker sighed in frustration earlier, but when I asked him what was wrong, he said he hadn't sighed -- we figured out that I'd actually heard someone sneezing a few offices away. I wonder how long it'll take me to build a filter to categorize and ignore that kind of thing. I know that the cochlear implant processors can filter out noise, but I really don't want them to -- it's skill I'd rather have for my own so I can enjoy hearing sounds and making my own judgments. -------- If anyone wants to ask anything, I'm certainly up for answering. If it's a private question (say, if you're trying to decide about a cochlear implant), then please feel free to e-mail me (my address is in my profile).