Allied Health in Action
University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill
Hearing The Sound Of Her Children's Voices For The First Time
| Stephanie Sjoblad , AuD, is an Assistant Professor of Audiology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Her responsibilities include teaching students enrolled in the four-year, Doctor of Audiology program, and seeing patients in the University's Hearing and Communication Center. Her patients are among the 30 million Americans who live with hearing loss. Audiologists today must be highly trained in the physics and acoustics of hearing, the nature and causes of hearing loss, and the many sophisticated technologies now available for the diagnosis and treatment of hearing loss. |  |
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Dr. Sjoblad brings a unique level of insight to her teaching and clinical practice because, for nearly 40 years, she has struggled with her own hearing loss. Diagnosed at age 5 she began wearing hearing aids at age 6. Fortunately by then, she had already begun to develop language skills. However, each year her hearing got progressively worse. By the birth of her second child, Dr. Sjoblad was considered profoundly deaf. Now, after years of lip-reading, being fitted and re-fitted for hearing aids, and no longer being able to communicate by phone, she decided that she wanted a |
| cochlear implant--a device she often recommends to her patients -- so that she could hear her husband and her two young children. Dr. Sjoblad's 90-minute CI surgery was performed by a physician colleague at UNC Hospitals, Dr. Craig Buchman. He says because of her progressive hearing loss, she was an ideal candidate for a cochlear implant. The implanted device picks up sound from the environment and decodes it into a digital signal. That signal is then transferred across the skin via radio waves to an internal receiver stimulator which stimulates the cochlear nerve. The brain translates that into various sounds. It is and will be a transformation for Stephanie Sjoblad as well. The audiologist, professor, wife and mother, will now have to adjust hearing the world in a whole new way. |
| A well trained audiologist plays an essential role on the cochlear implant team. Before the implant, the audiologist conducts a comprehensive audiologic evaluation to determine if the patient is a candidate for CI and, if so, to provide the surgeon with a detailed analysis of the patient's hearing loss and any residual hearing. Then, after the patient has healed from the actual implantation surgery, the audiologist sees the patient again to activate and adjust the CI. |  |
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Finally, the audiologist provides post-implantation therapy to help the patient learn to recognize the new environmental and speech sounds being transmitted to the patient's brain. The audiologist on Dr. Buchman's CI team was Marcia Clark Adunka, one of Dr. Sjoblad's former students! Click the link below to watch a brief video about Dr. Sjoblad's CI procedure, and to see her initial reactions when the CI was activated. |
http://www.med.unc.edu/www/news/2009-news-archives/june/hearing-things-differently-now/
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