By Paula Span, KFF Health News

Kitty Grutzmacher had contended with poor hearing for a decade, but the problem had worsened over the past year. Even with her hearing aids, she said, “there was little or no sound.”

“I was avoiding going out in groups. I stopped playing cards, stopped going to Bible study, even going to church.”

Her audiologist was unable to offer Grutzmacher, a retired nurse in Elgin, Illinois, a solution. But she found her way to the cochlear implant program at Northwestern University.

There, Krystine Mullins, an audiologist who assesses patients’ hearing and counsels them about their options, explained that surgically implanting this electronic device usually substantially improved a patient’s ability to understand speech.

“I had never even thought about it,” Grutzma

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