The Milestone Patient

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As Don Lynch lay sleeping in his apartment six years ago, a carelessly tossed cigarette butt by a stranger had ignited an inferno. While the building’s fire alarms were working, their ear-piercing frequency did nothing to stir Don from his bed. On the best of days, with his hearing aids turned up in a quiet room, he could only hear 20% of the conversation. Turned off in the night, the screaming fire alarms were quite literally falling on deaf ears.

“I almost lost my life because when my hearing aid came out, I heard nothing. Nothing!” he told me. “The fireman got me out just before the window blew in and would have killed me.”

Sunnybrook's cochlear implant program has marked
a major milestone

Don had been diagnosed with Meniere’s disease (an inner ear disorder that impacts balance and hearing) in one ear, and lost the hearing in his other ear after surgery. While he used a hearing aid for many years, eventually, it wasn’t enough.

That’s what brought him to Sunnybrook’s Cochlear Implant Program, a surgery he had done in 2010. And a surgery, he told me, that gave him his life back. As soon as his device was activated one month after the implant was put in, he could hear again. “I couldn’t stop it, the tears were coming down, I couldn’t stop it,” he says. “You can rejoin life. It blows me away.”

Sunnybrook has the largest adult Cochlear Implant Program in Ontario, and just last week, the team, led by Dr. Vincent Lin, celebrated a huge accomplishment: implanting their 1000th patient. The milestone patient is Paul Wheeler, who has been through a lot with his own hearing loss; early retirement and social stigma to name a few. The nature of cochlear implants is that time is typically needed for patients to reach their full potential with the device. I’ll be following Paul over the next few months and will produce a video on his progress. Watch for that later this year.

Now two years removed from his surgery, Don still comes in for testing and adjustments to the device. The day I met him, Don was in for an appointment with an audiologist. Sitting in a soundproof booth, he was asked to repeat complex sentences recited in a restaurant-like setting. He can now hear about 90% of speech in a noisy room. “I’m back to the opera, and I go to the ballet!” he told me.

Sunnybrook’s team is now involved in research to improve the next generation of cochlear implants. Much like personal computers, they have become much smaller and more sophisticated. (It’s hard to believe there was a time patients had to wear backpacks to power the devices!) And there is a push to improve the number of frequencies the devices can pick up. Only a handful are needed to decipher normal speech, but music is much more complex. Conquering that next frontier would be not only be sweet for Sunybrook’s team, but also their next 1000 patients. Stay tuned!

The Cost of News

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There is an expression in newsrooms called “feeding the black”, referring to the insatiable beast that is the 24-hour news wheel. Dead air is not an option, so providing a steady diet of instant sound bites is the new name of the game. But with more news all the time, there’s a risk of taking the process for granted, particularly for news items covering conflict abroad. For all the little snippets of destruction we graze before clicking forward on our remotes, there is a crew of journalists and photographers risking their lives somewhere in the line of fire.

An image from Under Fire: Journalists in Combat.

Only 2 journalists were killed covering World War One. Yet in the last two decades, more than 900 have lost their lives reporting from war zones. Like many of us, Sunnybrook’s Dr. Anthony Feinstein says, he never really considered the dangers front line journalists faced until he encountered a particular patient in 1999. She was a war reporter working for a large news organization suffering from a condition called conversion disorder, meaning her neurological symptoms couldn’t be explained by a physical cause. Her body appeared to be having a severe reaction to extreme stress.

Dr. Feinstein was intrigued. He asked his research team to search what had been published on the topic of journalism, trauma and war. Incredibly, nothing had. Dr. Feinstein followed up with a grant application to a Washington organization called the Freedom Forum, who funded his first study on this topic. More than a decade of pioneering work later, Dr. Feinstein is now a leader in this area of care and research. And his newest project – a documentary he produced called Under Fire: Journalists in Combat – was shortlisted for an Academy Award.

The film is a raw look into the terrors faced by many journalists covering war and their struggles to cope. It’s estimated that about 29% will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that can affect daily functioning and increases the risk for substance abuse and suicide. Dr. Feinstein has given their suffering not only a name, but also hope in ongoing treatment. As one reporter explained in the film, he used to call his problem “needing a drink”. Now, he knows it’s PTSD, and can reach for a phone consult rather than the bottle.

So what’s the difference between how a journalist and a soldier experience war? Absolutely nothing. Dr. Feinstein hopes this documentary will continue to raise awareness about the extraordinary risks journalists in combat face, as well as continued support for research. The film has made the storytellers the headline. It’s up to rest of us to decide if and when we reach for the remote.