Hearing Without Ears

This story covers the author's journey from the time she fell into a coma and woke up totally deaf, through her surgery to get an "electronic ear" (more correctly called a cochlear implant) and the ongoing effort to learn how to use it to hear again. There are many problems with substitute hearing, but they do fade--like background noise--to a place of lesser importance. Electronic hearing may not be perfect, but it's a whole lot better than no hearing at all.

Across most of her lifetime as a hearing person, Linda Knapp was a high school/college English teacher, senior writer at Apple Computer, columnist for The Seattle Times and McClatchy-Tribune news services, published writer of education books andnovels, and committed wife and mother. Now, Linda is a deaf writer, wife and mother, who is trying to accept deafness gracefully, while hearing electronically with cochlear implants.