Kristin Matta is from Colorado Springs and has a son who was implanted at 3 1/2, is now 12, and has a CI. He had two hearing aids growing up and kept struggling to hear, she felt he was working too hard to hear. Cochlear implants were an option but she felt she had some misinformation, such as the size of the cochlear implant body processors, or static discharge. She talked to many many people, maybe over 100 people, just to be secure in her understanding of it being right for her son.

She really praised Med-El’s customer service, she would have a broken cable at 7:30pm on a Friday of a 3 day weekend, and Med-El was there and able to take care of things with her, so she is grateful for that choice.

They showed a video of Garrett, her son, talking about his love for sports, and dogs. He says the CI is so amazing and it’s made a big impact on his life, he wouldn’t be able to hear and talk to us on the pre-recorded video right now. He goes to school in Colorado Springs middle school and he hears the teachers pretty well.  He wears his implant while playing sports, he hears on the phone and cell phones, with no special equipment, he enjoys music and his big challenge is sometimes with background noise, in the classroom can be a challenge, or in a restaurant.

His mother feels that her son has his expectations set really high and

He won’t take off the CI – he wears it even in showering rain with soccer, his mom had a conversation with him just last week about that and he said he’d rather stop playing than take off his CI.

Her husband did some things to his helmets to help make it fit with the CI better – baseball and biking helpmets.

He does take it off when he goes swimming, but many times when he gets wet it’s water resistant.

He is not bi-modal, he prefers his lone CI.

He was not bi-laterally implanted because it was not standard at the time, and we kept just putting off, like if he’s doing bad in school, we’ll get a second one, or maybe one is cool, two will socially stunt him, things like that.