“Playing in the orchestra is one of the most emotional things that has happened to me in my life.” are words of April Vargasa 15-year-old girl without her cochlear implant I would have a radically different life. She was born extremely premature at 25 weeks and immediately had to wear hearing aids, but later things got complicated and she was left deaf of the right ear. It was then that they operated on her to place this device that changed everything.
“I remember that I did not listen to some things that they told me and suddenly, with the implant, I began to hear sounds that were new to me: the singing of birds, the bells of the town or the doorbell of my house,” she says excitedly. Soon after, she enrolled in the music school of Sant Esteve Sesrovires and began to play transverse flute: “I skipped the step of trying the recorder first and jumped right into the hard stuff.”
After a while the idea came Maria Antonia Claveria Puigdoctor in the Sant Joan de Deu Hospital: for give visibility to the implant, he brought together several deaf children who played an instrument and created a group that would not sound without these implants: the Graeme Clark Orchestra (named after the otolaryngologist who performed the first cochlear implant in 1978). The Gaes Foundation he got involved and suddenly a saxophone, a cello, a trumpet, a clarinet and Abril’s transverse flute appeared, of course. “It was very emotional,” he recalls, “we didn’t know each other at all and it was a somewhat strange mix of 10 people who had the same problem but also the same fans.” And the gear worked.
Also for the elderly
The cochlear implant is placed behind the ear and in the head using a surgery. It has two elements: one is responsible for receiving sounds and the other for transforming them into electrical impulses that are sent to the cochlea -the part inside the ear formerly known as the snail- so that they reach the brain.
Many patients, after the intervention, spend from a profound deafness to understand everything what they tell them. javier garciadirector of the Gaes Hearing Implants Area, maintains that much more should be promoted: “There are doctors who don’t even know about it and it is something that includes the public healthcarewhat happens is that it has not yet reached everyone”. García claims that not only the youngest resort to the implant, but also the old people: “It can change their lives, avoid social isolation or early dementia that often appears due to hearing problems.” Still, he acknowledges that it doesn’t work for all patients.
Only 5% of deaf people in Spain have a cochlear implant, some 22,000 lucky ones who, in many cases, have recovered almost all their hearing ability. Precisely so that this percentage grows, this week, taking advantage of the international day dedicated to this device, the ‘White Paper on cochlear implants in adults and the elderly’ has been presented in the Congress of Deputies.
April’s dream
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The implants have to be checked, and in fact, Abril has been changing them to be able to hear better: “With the latest version, I enjoy notes that I used to play but didn’t hear well.” Since the pandemic arrived, all the musicians parked the orchestra and now they don’t rehearse as much as before. Now this young woman has decided to get involved in another beautiful project: ‘ARTransforma’, which brings together artists with disabilities to play together.
His day to day is like that of any of his friends. “And if I don’t understand something, I tell them to repeat it to me as many times as necessary,” he explains without giving it any importance. When she grows up, she wants to compose songs or write books, she still hasn’t decided. However, what she is clear about is that without her cochlear implant her first option, that of inventing melodies, would be nothing more than an impossible dream.