My experience at the Cochlear Implant Clinic

For the past 4 weeks, as part of the speech pathology degree I am currently undertaking, I spent four days a week working at the Cochlear Implant Clinic at the Royal Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne Victoria. It's been like working in a miracle zone. Every single day I've been astonished with delight.

The clinic is the place in Victoria and Tasmania where people come to get cochlear implants. But beyond that, they are pioneers of the cochlear implant. The implants, conceived and developed right here in Melbourne by Professor Graeme Clark and his colleagues, are now used by more than 120,000 people worldwide. The clinic does implants for both adults and children, but because I was working with the three speech pathologists at the clinic, who work almost exclusively with the children who receive implants, I was almost entirely working with children. Hence my daily astonishment and delight.

There are 3 parts to your ear--outer, middle, and inner ear. The inner ear, called the cochlea, is shaped kind of like a nautilus shell. It forms a spiral, and sound travels along that spiral, where there are ~16,000 tiny little cells called hair cells. Sounds of varying frequencies activate varying hair cells, with higher pitch sounds activating hair cells in the lower part of the spiral, and lower pitch sounds activating cells in the higher part of the spiral. When the hair cells are activated, they send signals to the auditory nerve, which in turn delivers signals to the auditory cortex of your brain, causing you to hear sound. The fact that you have 16,000 hair cells means that you get incredibly high fidelity sound quality. You hear the tiniest nuances of speech, of music, of your air conditioning, of thunder and snow falling--all the sounds that we often take for granted.

For most of history, children who were born with cochleas that didn't work simply never got to hear. Having cochleas that don't work on both the left and the right sides is called bilateral profound sensorineural hearing loss. It means that while the sound may get to your cochlea, your cochlea is unable for some reason to use the hair cells to change the sound into the elecrochemical signal that travels down your auditory nerve to your auditory cortex.

The cochlear implant consists of two parts, an internal and an external. The internal part has a tiny little tube with 22 electrodes in it. This tube is inserted into the cochlea, and the electrodes are of varying lengths and thus reach to various parts of the spiral. Each electrode, when it carries power, activates in a different of the cochlea, creating input to the auditory nerve at various frequencies. Of course there is loss of fidelity with 22 electrodes now doing the work that was previously done by 16,000 hair cells. Nevertheless, I even saw one of the children with whom I worked singing a tune! The external part of the implant contains 2 small microphones and a tiny little computer with some pretty amazing software. It takes incoming audio signal and processes it, then sends information to the internal part thusly activating the 22 electrodes in the cochlea.

Being born with both cochleas not working used to mean, for most people, being part of a very tiny first language group--sign language--with learning spoken language being incredibly difficult to impossible. Now, in Australia and many western nations, universal newborn hearing screening means that children born with little or no hearing are identified by health professionals before they leave the hospital in which they were born. And in more and more cases, this means that somewhere between the ages of 6 and 9 months they will likely receive one or two cochlear implants, and thus have access to sound from a very young age. Barring any other difficulties, they will grow up hearing and learning spoken language in pretty much the same manner as their normally hearing peers. They will be able to have conversations with any of the many native speakers of their larger community's spoken language, and will have the option to learn any other spoken language they might choose, gaining access to conversation with almost any of the 7 billion of us.

So every day I was working with little children who had received cochlear implants and who were now understanding and using spoken language at the same developmental level as their typically hearing peers. I grew up hearing this story about Jesus miraculously healing a deaf fellow. And here we are, healing the deafness of children early enough to give them access to spoken language, as a matter of course, almost. It's miracles every day. Hurrah!

P.S. I want to point out that I mean absolutely no disrespect for the deaf community. Having never really been part of a small minority group, I can't even really imagine what this sort of transitional time must be like for that community. It seems to me that it might be something like being part of a very small first language group, a few hundred people in a big city, for instance, not being able to learn a second language, and then suddenly all of the children in the community, who previously would have learned your language, are now learning the majority language and are no longer learning your language at all. I wonder if there are parallels between the current transition for the deaf community, with the advent of universal newborn hearing screening and young cochlear implantation, and the experience of other minority language groups whose language are dying because the children are assimilating and learning only the majority language. I'd be very open to hearing criticisms of my viewpoint or stories from within the deaf community. I would definitely want to respond to such stories with opennness and respect.

Shannon Stephens!

Christmas, summertime, and cognitive dissonance

  This December has been my third Christmas season since moving to Oz in December 2009. I think for the first time since we moved here, I'm feeling settled enough to allow myself to notice the extraordinarily bizarre way in which Australians adopt all the practices and customs of the Northern hemisphere holiday in blatant disregard of the fact that we are approaching summer solstice.

  I spoke to a mum from our kids' primary school today, and she confessed to having a surface sense of the strangeness of decorating with snowflakes.  I believe, however, that most Australians are unable, and will always be unable, to appreciate the deep meaningfulness of all these customs in the same way as those of us who grew up north of the 45th parallel.

  Some Melbournites spend a lot of hours affixing thousands and thousands of Christmas lights to their houses.  I  imagine having this conversation with any one of them:

You realize, don't you, that the POINT of putting up Christmas lights is to lift everyone's spirits in the coldest, darkest, most horrible time of year--when everyone is feeling suicidal because they're half frozen and and haven't seen the sun in 10 weeks?

Huh?  Oh--I think I know what you mean.  I remember once back in the winter of '79, there were like 3 days when the temperature dropped below 10 degrees (Celsius--that's 50 degrees Fahrenheit), in July.  I wasn't old enough to really remember, but my parents were traumatized for years.

  The other evening, about 6:30 PM, I was walking along past the coffee shop near my home. The sun was still high in the sky, and it was about 79 degrees F outside (that's 26 C). Blaring over the sound system from the coffee shop was some Christmas song the lyrics of which were about "frosty air".  Most Melbournites, I assume, have never actually experienced frosty air.  I certainly haven't seen any since moving here 25 months ago.  Maybe when they fly for ski vacations to New Zealand or something.

  The Australian church fathers, whoever they might be, should have done us all a favo(u)r and, having consulted with their magi/scientists, when they arrived they should have flipped the church calender about a 6 month axis.  Then, even though it never gets cold and never actually gets properly seasonally dark either, and even though the days are still longer than they're meant to be at winter solstice, at least there'd be SOME sort of reasoning behind trying to cheer yourself up a little in June/July, using festive sparkly tinsel and bulbs and lights and feasts and so forth.

A narrative review of my experience upon visiting Arkhouse church (St Kilda) services this morning--an attempt to thoughtfully engage difference.

(conversely, you can also read or respond to this review at churchrater.com)

     This week I had a perhaps not-entirely-gentle-gracious-and-respectful email, blog, and facebook interaction with Pastor Dan Saunders and his wife Ali Saunders.  See here, and here. Having written about the experience on churchrater.com, I thought that to give them a fair shake I should actually attend one of their services. So this morning off I poked to the Dick Whittington Tavern on Chapel street. Sunday morning traffic was light and it was very easy to find parking.  I poked into the pub, where I ordered a coffee from the vivacious Cabrina, whom I asked “What’s it like having a church meeting in your pub?”. “Strange,” she replied with a big smile. I also met a lovely fellow from South Australia who was there ordering his first beer of the day. He shared with me that he was hungover from last night, and it was that time of year, which I found delicious.

     Dan saw me and walked over and shook my hand making lots of eye contact, which I rather liked. There followed a longish (~15 minutes?) and I must confess not-entirely-comfortable-on-my-part conversation with Dan. He said he wanted to know my motivation for being there, and when I answered (as per above), he said he didn’t believe me, felt I had been deceptive, was afraid that I was there to cause trouble or disruption, and that he felt very offended by me and suspicious. When I reassured him that I wasn’t there to cause any trouble, and only wanted to sit quietly in the back and take notes, he continued to express disbelief and suspicion, and pressed me for my real motivation. He said that part of the reason he didn’t trust me was that I had emailed his wife “behind his back”. Here’s the text of the email I sent Ali this week, after she shared with me that she felt bullied by me:

Ali,

     Just to say in case you didn't see it on facebook that I've deleted the email that you requested I delete. In the past, I've found it very frightening to be known, and thus found myself easily feeling bullied. Just wanted to say I am willing to accept and even delight in you being exactly where you're at, and I'm sending you good thoughts that you will get to exactly where you want to get to. Also I believe that love will bring you to a place, in the perfect time, where you are not frightened, and where you have such a delicious sense of freedom and inner strength that it will be impossible for you to feel bullied regardless of anyone's actions or words.

Here's a song I find delicious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e39UmEnqY8

Best,
Benjamin

I expressed to Dan that the very idea that it was possible to email a woman behind her husband’s back seemed very patriarchal to me. I also expressed to him that it seemed to me that people in positions of leadership who are easily frightened, offended, and suspicious are rather likely to hurt those with whom they are involved as leaders. At one point about 2/3 of the way through our conversation, Dan asked if I was recording our conversation, and insisted on seeing my phone to verify that I wasn’t. Near the end of our conversation, I started to ask about (genuinely wanting to understand, still) why exactly he was so distressed about my publishing of our email correspondence, but before we could begin to address this, Dan said he had to pull away from our conversation because he needed to begin the service.

     During my conversation with Dan, another fellow named Nathan  came and joined us and introducing himself, asked about my vocation. It felt delicious to have him show interest in me rather than discomfort toward me. When he learned my vocation, he shared that his wife Hannah, whom I met briefly later, was also a speech pathologist!  Hurrah! This wee conversation felt SO normal and lovely =). I ended up sitting next to Nathan and Hannah during the service.

     The service took place in one corner of the tavern, which had been set off from the rest of the tavern by one of those foldup faux walls. There were three rows of seats and a big flatscreen TV for videos and lyrics. Dan welcomed everyone and graciously said “Even Ben—we welcome you today.” (although I rather prefer “Benjamin”) I guess he decided to make the best of me being there. =). The service began rather later than the advertised time of 10AM—exactly at 10:28. But perhaps this is atypical because of Dan’s long conversation with me beforehand.

     A lady named Selah came forward and shared about how she and her hubby Chris had been making friends in their apartment block and how God had been showing them that it wasn’t about making projects of people, but rather genuinely loving them, and praying for them behind their backs—something I first heard about from my friend Randy Seiver, and find delicious =).
 
    There were about 15 adults and ~5 gorgeous little primary school age children in the gathering.
 
     There was an incredibly cute video with a contemporary retelling of the Christmas narrative by gorgeous little children dressed up as the various characters—I’m pretty sure these were Dan and Ali’s kids. Lots of laughter during this video—it was very well done.  I think they must have had a grand old time putting it together during the week.
 
      A violinist, an acoustic guitarist, and an amazing female vocalist led several Christmas carols. It felt very acoustic and brilliant. I’m not a fan of Christmas carols, but if one must do them this seems exactly the way.
   
     The sermon was from 11:05 to 11:40. 35 minutes is rather shorter than the average of over 50 minutes for Dan’s sermons. Scattered throughout the sermon were a few rather cheesy videos which were a play on the mac vs. pc theme, between Jesus and Bob, who plays Santa at the local mall, with Jesus exhibiting rather painfully high levels of earnestness, I thought. The first of these, with which Dan began, was (unfortunately, in my opinion) harping on the theme of saying “merry Christmas” vs. “happy holidays”. Regarding this, it’s perhaps interesting that the church is meeting in the geographical center of Judaism in Melbourne.
   
     The sermon was incredibly instructive for me—I’ll explain how shortly. It seemed to me that there were two major themes. The first was (to radically rephrase) that people are basically completely fucked, and fucked up. Or to quote directly, “Nothing can quell our inner torment, caused by anger, hatred, lust, doubts, fears, and insecurities--the inner hole we long to fill.” There was reference made to many of the major disasters that had happened this year—tsunami in Japan, New Zealand earthquakes, Brisbane and Pakistan floods, Global Financial Crisis, wars of ideology, war on terror (that delightful phrase that’s both an oxymoron and a redundancy simultaneously) etc. “We all want happiness. The human spirit searches  for inner purpose, peace, meaning, but in every part of life we still find dissatisfaction. Inner frustration when work doesn’t measure up--nothing seems to bring peace.  Nothing satisfies.” He referenced popular culture memes along this line, such as the U2 song “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” “We still don’t feel satisfied/peace. We are slaves to [gadgets] that we know are empty.” He quoted Carl Jung

Nowadays more and more people, especially those who live in large cities, suffer from terrible emptiness and boredom, as if they are waiting for something that never arrives. Movies and television, spectator sports, and political excitements may divert them for a while, but again and again, exhausted and disenchanted, they have to return to the wasteland of their own lives. 

     The second major theme was that Jesus’ birth was this miraculous, amazing, delicious event in which God steps in to provide a solution to all this darkness, angst, etc., and that we mustn’t leave this amazing present from God as the unwrapped present left at the bottom of the Christmas tree. It set me to thinking of this lyric from the U2 song Dan referenced.

You broke the bonds
And you loosed the chains
Carried the cross
Of my shame
Oh my shame
You know I believe it

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for 

"God is offering through Jesus peace—real inner peace. Jesus birth is the greatest moment in human history. What Bethlehem did in ignorance—rejecting this prezzy (that’s Aussie for “present”), many Aussies do today willfully—but we really must accept and embrace this gift if we want meaning, joy, peace, etc., etc." He quoted Napolean

Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.

     Near the end of the sermon Dan referenced the Santa Clause myth, and talked about how this myth strongly affects us in our formative years by contradicting the biblical narrative that we are basically naughty and broken, instead proving to us every Christmas, when we get presents, that actually we have been weighed up and found to be basically good. He said “God’s gift rests on any person who through humble deep soul searching is willing to turn away from the hole filled with their own rubbish and ask Jesus to fill that hole with his peace.—the greatest gift ever.”

       This sermon really helped me understand two things. Firstly, in a new way I’ve never quite experienced before, I came to understand my own past in a new light. No WONDER I suffered from depression, annihilating self hatred, and so forth for so many years!  From the age of 9 until the age of 24, this was the milieu in which I was enstoried. The primary theme was the basic cursedness of the world and people, and the secondary theme was that God has deliciously and amazingly come up with a miraculous and wonderful solution to this. Secondly, no wonder Dan is frightened, suspicious, and offended. He believes that both I and he are basically fucked up.
   
     My final note is this: this church could absolutely become the Mars Hill(Seattle)/Hillsong(Sydney) of Melbourne. They totally have the potential. I just don’t know if Melbourne is the sort of place where such a thing can exist at all. Kind of hope not. Guess we’ll see. =)

How I got off the fundamentalist ride, Exhibit A.

     Megs and I were wed in November 2000, in Port Macquarie, NSW, on the beach. It rocked. During the 3 months I spent in Australia in late 2000, a couple different things happened. On our honeymoon, we stopped in some little town and I got my ear pierced and a small earring. Also, during that time, I spent about 30 hours reading, trying to sort something out that I knew I needed to sort before we returned to my home church near Seattle. During my two years on LOGOS II, for very practical reasons, I had given up on the King James Version Onlyism of my home church (now Lifepoint Church NW). This because the small groups in which I participated, while operating in English, were composed mostly of folks from lots of nations who were operating in English as their second language. I quickly noticed that there was no way they could deal with the King James translation of the Bible. I suspected that this explanation wasn't going to fly with my home church, so I did some reading to figure out some better explanation. Also, I spent a few hours conversing with my wife and her two lovely sisters, and without quite realizing it my politics, which had already largely shifted anyway, were more or less cemented over to very left, while when I left Seattle they were very very right.

     When we flew back to Seattle in early January 2001, it was with the understanding that I was probably going to be offered a staff position at that church. However, that first Sunday, I completely and utterly failed to appreciate the politics of the situation. Pastor Tom welcomed me back and asked me to share a bit. I came up to the pulpit with my new ear ring. I'm sure he and everyone were shocked, but I had no clue at the time. I'd been away for 2 and a half years, and didn't quite realize how much I'd changed and how much they'd stayed the same. In fact, I shared with them that I wanted to become a Bible translator, and read a longish section from The Preface to the Readers (that's actually a bit of a delicious read which I recommend) which was originally contained with the King James translation. In it, the translators do a rather deliciously excellent job of dismantling all the arguments of the King James Onlyists--arguments which they themselves were of course having to deal with because there were those at the time making similar arguments about earlier English translations. Again, I think I had no clue how deeply closed they were. I'm told that my pastor was sitting there in the front row obviously displaying barely controlled fury. I didn't notice it at the time.

     After that, for a number of weeks, I had several meetings with Pastor Tom, during which we discussed various things, and he gave me lots of books to read which he believed supported his KJV only position, although it seemed to me that the books, written from very much inside the KJV only camp, instead made rather a spectacular case for the outright silliness of that entire camp (I think Revision Revised may have been among them). I was muddling along thinking/hoping that they would change/open enough to accommodate my views. My poor wife was muddling along feeling very very dismissed and ignored and generally shut out. No one at the church would talk to her. I think perhaps the guys were all a bit terrified of a gorgeous powerful women, and the women were all a bit cowed. No person had ever long been a member of that church who was not very much a white, right wing, fundamentalist American, and now here was this Australian, left wing, Anglican feminist Christian.

     Anyway, after the it's a small world story I told you earlier, I decided, all of sudden, that they were never going to change, and I asked Pastor Tom for a meeting to share with him about why we were leaving. He took the liberty of inviting the entire board of elders--four middle age white guys. The same pastor who'd asked me the small world question, upon hearing of this meeting, suggested to us that we schedule something else for about an hour after the meeting in case we needed an escape excuse, which turned out to be very handy.

     So one Sunday afternoon sometime in February 2001, Megan and I found ourselves sitting in the church office around a table with four rather serious looking middle age white guys. We spent about an hour beating around the bush. I explained that I'd realized that two and a half years earlier, my path and their path had diverged at perhaps a 10 degree angle. Not much of an angle, but over two years, we'd gotten further and further apart, so that now they were on path A, and I was on Path B, and I certainly wasn't going to come back over to their path, and it had become clear to me that they weren't going to come over to my path, so I thought we should just leave it at that, and part as friends. They were very dissatisfied with this explanation, and wanted to know about the exact nature of the stuff in between our two paths. I think they wanted to argue about it--to try to convince me to come back over to their path. I was extremely disinterested in doing this, and pretty much refused. We went back and forth for a long time. I felt very sad. At the end I was crying. It represented a big loss for me--they'd been my entire community from 87 to 98. They seemed angry rather than sad. I think they perhaps felt they'd made a big investment in me, and perhaps even had high hopes that I'd be a big cog in the machinery of their church which would help it grow and so forth.

     Near the end of an hour, Megs, who had been very very quiet, finally spoke up and said "Look, Benjamin has realized that this church is never ever going to accept me, and he decided he loves and values his relationship with me more than his relationship with this church." At that point, Tom became visibly furious. He is about 6 feet 2 inches tall, and is a very muscular and heavy man, with bright red hair. He leaned over the table, right into Megs' face, and, slamming his fist down on the table right in front of her, he shouted "You should NEVER have put him in that position."

     After that, I spoke up and said that alas we had another meeting we had scheduled and we didn't want to be late, so we'd have to be going. The youngest of the elders, Mark, then in his early 30's, I'd guess, found this outrageous, and said several times rather loudly "HOW CONVENIENT!!!". And of course he was right, it was incredibly convenient. Tom and the others strongly requested that we cancel the other meeting and stay until we could finish sorting everything out (to their satisfaction). We of course declined, and off we went.

     After that we had relatively little interaction with anyone from that church--some of whom I'd known for years and been very good friends with. It wasn't the best parting. I'd do it somewhat differently now, but I think at the time, it was really the only way I could leave. It has seemed to me, in the past, looking at that church, that in some sense the leaders act in the role of parents, and the parishioners act in the role of children, and the only way for the parishioners to leave in a growing up sort of way is the way in which I left. Or something like that. I remember from when I was inside the church all those years--that others would leave in such a way---that somehow they'd just be gone, and the general sense was that they had fallen away out into the big dangerous world, where people believed things other than the safe prescribed beliefs of our church. The hope was always that someday maybe they'd come back into our safe little fold and be okay again. But they rarely did. In fact there was a very tiny core of long termers, and other than that the membership was mostly medium term revolving door type people.

Awesome story by E, aged 9

My lovely daughter shared this story with us today.

The Never Ending Trail

by Eowyn Ady

Every day I saw it towering above me like a giant for the past 20 years, and now here I am ready to climb it. I took a step, then another, then another. I was just starting to feel more confident when suddenly something or someone grabbed me and began to pull.

I screamed for help. I was sinking into the ground. "Help!", I cried again, but I knew it was no use. People have died on this mountain. Nobody comes anywhere near it if they can help it. Then I realized something. I was no longer being pulled into the earth. Instead, something seemed to be tying my feet together. But that's not what was surprising me most. The rope felt very much like tree root. Then it hit me that it *was* tree root, tree root that was still connected to its sapling. They were going to grow the tree on top of me. I remember my mother once telling about these creatures. They wait for you to die then grow the tree on top of you then the tree eats you. There's only one way to get away--laughter! I thought, then I said a joke that made everybody laugh.

No More Shooting and Crying