Choosing an implanted bone anchored aid is a difficult choice to make and each family’s choice is their own. I’m sharing our journey hoping it helps other families just starting out. I was always curious how families like ours fared, and what actually went into a decision like this, so I’m hoping our story might help others on their own path.
Our child is a teenager now, but this story starts in babyhood, when they were first fitted with a Bone Anchored Hearing Aids (BAHAs) on a softband. They have bilateral mixed hearing differences and have always done well with their devices: worn all waking hours, at school, in sports, through music lessons.
Starting to Consider an Implant
The idea came up gradually, not all at once. We’d ask our Audiologist and Ear, Nose & Throat Doctor about possibilities every so often, and there was never any urgency behind it. Our child was doing well with their current devices, so this was never a problem we needed to solve. It was more that we wanted to know about options and devices and how they were different.
Image Source: https://microtiaandatresiacare.com/hearing-loss/hearing-devices/
My partner and I felt strongly that our child needed to be developmentally ready to understand what surgery would actually mean: the recovery, the incision scars, and what would and wouldn’t change. So this wasn’t a question we answered once. It was something we kept returning to, over the years, as our child grew and their own understanding grew with it.
We also believe strongly in body autonomy, and from early on we wanted our child to be part of the conversation about implants, not just informed of a decision made for them, but genuinely part of making the decision.
Researching and Deciding
This is really the heart of our story. I spent years reading about other families’ and individuals’ experiences with the devices available to us, looking for patterns in what worked and what didn’t. I joined user forums and Facebook groups for the devices available to do that research.
More than anything, though, we felt this was our child’s decision to make, not ours. About once a year, we’d check in with them: how did they feel about their hearing aids now, about the possibility of implants, now that they were a bit older and had a bit more context. We made sure they had a realistic sense of what surgery, recovery, and life afterward might actually look like, not an idealized version, and not a scary one either, just an honest one.
The path wasn’t straight, and I don’t think it needed to be. We waited until they were old enough to weigh in themselves, and in the end, they were the one who decided when the time was right. That felt like the right outcome for us, not because we’d pushed toward implants, and not because we’d held back from them, but because the decision genuinely belonged to our child, with unconditional love and support from us.
What Came After
Once the decision was made, the rest followed. This included consultations, surgery, recovery, and activation. The process had its own challenges and its own relatively smooth moments, as these things do. But the part of this journey I most wanted to share isn’t the logistics of surgery; it’s the years of small, patient conversations that led our child to a decision they felt was truly theirs.
Reflections
We’re a year out from surgery and our child’s implants are very much a part of who they are, just like their softband BAHAs were. We have no regrets. Our child is loving the freedom of not having to wear a softband, and having their music stream right into their devices and truly hearing music with stereo sound in a way that they hadn’t experienced before.
We feel truly lucky to have had the excellent care we received at BC Children’s Hospital and we really love our Implant Team there.
Wherever you’re at in your own family’s journey, my advice is to research and ask questions- from your service providers, community members and online. Find the information that you need to be able to make the best decision for your family.
Read more articles about BAHAs and implants here:
https://bchandsandvoices.com/?s=BAHA
