Given my line of work, this may strike you as absurd or even quixotic, but my ability to hear music has been severely limited for most of my life. I could not hear bass notes at all and the treble petered off in indiscriminate ways. Understanding lyrics sometimes required repeated listening. It was a mess, but I made the most out of what I had.

When my BAHA implant was activated in 2009 I was able to hear a wider range of sound, but only in mono. Even my bilateral BAHA was limited to mono.

This year I upgraded to a new sound processor. It has a ton of features, but the big one for me is that the two processors link up to my iPad to stream audio in full stereo.

For the first time in my fifty years on earth, I can hear recorded music in an almost normal fashion. It’s just being blasted into my skull instead of my ears.

A lot happened to me in 2019. Some of it good and some of it bad. I will remember this time as a tearful joyful homecoming. After traveling so very far, after working so desperately hard, I finally am at a place where I have a clear view of the horizon and it is wonderful because it is so familiar – exactly as I knew it would be, but with infinite possibilities to explore.