Rambling for Kirwan Uniting Church Keep in Touch newsletter 2 August 2020
Most of you know that I’m waiting for an op date for a cochlear implant. Should be within the next couple of months. If you don’t know what a cochlear implant is, it’s an electronic device inserted inside my skull and then attached by a magnet to a receiver outside, which mimics what undamaged hearing nerves would do, first to actually “hear” sounds and then to interpret them as words (or music, or a door slamming, or whatever). Actually, it’s my brain which does the interpreting, and that needs retraining after 25 years of total deafness in my left ear. The receiver thingy outside looks like a beer-bottle cap, you might have seen people sporting them and wondered what they were. My audiologist said that he’d order a device to match my hair colour. “Silver-grey OK?” My meta-physical poet mate George Herbert (remember him from last week?) wrote: The harbingers are come. See, see their mark: White is their colour, and behold my head. But must they have my brain? Must they dispark T...