A question was asked to me, "why now?" why after all these years did I decide to get a cochlear implant now? Simply put...because it was time. Let me start at the beginning. Im Karen, 55 years old and lost my hearing at age 8 due to an illness. My hearing loss was not discovered until I went off to college and had a geology class with 300 other students in an auditorium taught by slides with the lights off. Sitting on the front row, I still made a terrible grade. It later was my husband who discovered my loss by telling my parents that he is whispering sweet little nothings in my ear and not getting any response. At least that's the story he tells. Anyway back to why the implant now. I flew to Denver with my sister, Jill to see her daughter and her family August of 2011. While I was there I discovered I wasnt hearing well and thought oh well, its time to get new aides. I could not hear precious little Jassim at all!  To make a long story short, I came home from Denver, told Ed I needed new hearing aids and made an appointment. I decided since I noticed my loss was so great, I wanted to start over from scratch with a new dr a new audiologist, the whole shabang. I went to a new ENT (Dr. Noone) in Charleston and a new audiologist fresh out of school. What a tremendous move that was on my part! So here I will enter a big shout out to Natalie Bickley who was my audiologist. I will never forget the kindness I was treated with when she told me that she could not help me anymore that my hearing loss was "profound" and aides would no longer help me. She did say in her opinion, that I might be a good candidate for the implant and pointed me in the direction of MUSC in Charleston, SC. The office made all the arrangements and that was the starting point. Bless you Natalie for showing me the way.