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Technology helps a young deaf woman break the silence
Cochlear implant takes her on an uncertain journey to the land of the hearing
Thursday, September 28, 2000
Story by AMY E. NEVALA
Blond fuzz covers the mark, made a month ago when a surgeon shaved a strip of hair and embedded a high-tech hearing device the size of a quarter in her skull.
Now a question looms as Greenlee waits for the tests to begin. Will she hear again, 15 years after sound disappeared?
Greenlee's chances are good. The device is working for thousands of deaf people.
But others with it continue to live in silence.
The audiologist makes some final adjustments on a wire linking the implant to a computer. Then she turns to Greenlee and looks into her blue eyes.
"Are you ready?" she says. "It's time."
Road trips to San Francisco and her passions, dance and music, were more important. She could drive. She read lips. She could dance, and did, mimicking the steps of others because she could not hear the beat.
Unlike a hearing aid, worn outside the ear to amplify sound, a cochlear implant is surgically inserted in the skull. The implant bypasses the damaged hair cells, producing electrical impulses that the brain interprets as sound.
Greenlee, who had lost her hearing at age 8 for a reason still unknown, wasn't convinced.
"I had trouble dealing with the whole idea of an implant. The issue just seemed SOOO huge, so life-changing, it was too scary for me to even think about," she recalls in an e-mail. "SOOO ... in the back of my mind it went. Buried deep."
A year later, ready to move out on her own, she drove north from her Lake Tahoe home to Seattle, drawn to the "culture, diversity, art, nature."
She found an apartment on Capitol Hill and hung posters of Madonna, "a symbol of my past life as a hearing person."
The pop star's song "Lucky Star" is the last song she remembers hearing as a child.
Her life filled. Greenlee started at Bellevue Community College with the aid of a sign-language interpreter and adopted Miss Lady Storm, a male cat.
She pierced her chin with a silver stud. She cut and bleached her hair, wearing it fashionably messy.
On weekends she took friends dancing, pressing her hands or inflated balloons to the band's speakers to feel the music pulse.
Academically she soared, graduating in three years with a degree in administrative office systems. She landed two jobs in her field, doing administrative work for a music store on Capitol Hill and for a female-owned record label called ChickPop.
When friends ask about the seemingly odd marriage of a deaf person who loves music, she shrugged.
"I love the energy," she says.
She began dating Duane Beaman, whom she met at a birthday party. She liked that he bought a book on sign language before their second date, although communication with Beaman, a 28-year-old hearing person, wasn't a problem.
"We spend a lot of time just sitting around, staring at each other," Beaman says.
Life was good, but the implant idea seeded in her mind had taken root.
Maybe it was employers failing to hire interpreters for work meetings. Maybe it was sitting through family gatherings understanding about 20 percent of the conversation. Or leaving restaurants in tears before the drinks hit the table because the seating and lighting made it difficult to read friends' lips.
Greenlee, now 23, felt frustrated.
"Like big parts of life are passing me by, you know?" she explains to a friend.
And the time to remedy that was running out.
Hungry for information, she scoured the Internet. She read the pamphlets, talked with her family and learned the statistics.
Success levels varied widely among the 35,000 implant recipients worldwide, about half of whom are children. Studies showed that nearly all recipients improved in lip-reading, and about two-thirds gained the ability to understand speech without such cues.
But some recipients show no improvement and experts don't know why.
"There is a great possibility this CI (cochlear implant) may not work for me, and a great chance it might," she writes in an e-mail. "Either way ... the chance to hear? Rivers running, rain falling, a friend whispering softly. ... It seems very WELL worth the risk."
She met with a surgeon at the University of Washington Medical Center, scheduling the operation for Aug. 9.
"Everything went well, perfect," he says.
Greenlee returned home the day after the surgery, sleeping a lot.
"So, can you hear now?" friends asked in e-mails. She explained it would be another month before they "turned her on," testing to see if the implant worked.
She spent a lot of time alone, needing space. Blame it on the painkillers, the stresses of surgery or "plain old nerves," but her emotions took off on a roller coaster.
"I'm having a hard time staying still and just focusing on my body healing. My emotions are just all over the place, and that is hard to grasp," she says. "Will this work? Won't it? It's hard not to think about it."
She started a journal, jotting the sounds friends said they liked -- laughter, birds, people saying "I love you" -- and the sounds they didn't -- machines, traffic, the garbage truck. She focused on Sept. 11, the Monday the audiologist would turn on the implant.
The date fell on her father's 58th birthday.
"A lucky day," Greenlee believes.
On that day, she sits next to audiologist Tina Worman in a small, plain room at the UW Medical Center decorated with a vase of yellow lilies. For 90 minutes, Worman has been testing each of the 22 electrodes in her implant, sending a series of low and high beeps through the device to balance the sound.
Everything checks out. Worman gives the nod.
"It's time," she says, and Greenlee's younger sister, Melanie, sitting in for the testing, races to the lobby to get their parents. They gather in the room, her mother and sister seated next to Greenlee, her father leaning on the wall. They chat softly and grow quiet.
"Tell me if you can hear this," Worman says, then hides her mouth behind a green piece of paper so Greenlee can't read her lips. Worman opens her mouth and makes a sound.
"Aaaa."
Greenlee leans forward, her forehead creased. The sound doesn't register. Worman tries again.
"Eeee."
No response from Greenlee.
"Oooo," Worman says.
No response.
"Shhh."
Greenlee looks at Worman.
"That sounded like shhh."
"Daddy's gonna go outside now," he chokes. A few minutes later her mother, Barbara Greenlee, joins him in the lobby and they cry in each other's arms.
"There is no better birthday present than this," he says, touching white tissue to his eyes as he phones relatives.
Worman spends another hour testing and Gates, her surgeon, stops by to offer congratulations. He dubs her progress only hours after the first test "spectacular."
It is not perfect. She can repeat about half of the simple spoken words -- bat, ball, car -- but can't identify a single word in full spoken sentences. Asked to repeat the statement, "Let's have some coffee," Greenlee replies, "Simple or staple or something." Worman explains that is normal.
"After today it will get better," she says.
Like muscles that haven't been used in a long time, the newly awakened hearing centers must be conditioned to the sensations of sound through the implant.
The first day of testing over, Greenlee hugs her parents in the hospital's parking garage and promises to meet them later for a combined birthday party and celebration dinner. She keeps the implant on during a grocery stop to buy German chocolate cake mix.
Wandering the store aisles, she pokes a bag of tortilla chips and taps a cranberry juice bottle, smiling at the crinkling of plastic and clinking of glass.
She walks on, making music in the snack-food section.
P-I reporter Amy E. Nevala can be reached at amynevala@seattle-pi.com and 206-448-8132.
Photos by MERYL SCHENKER
The 6-inch scar curls behind Melissa Greenlee's left ear in the shape of a pink question mark. 
Melissa Greenlee familiarizes herself with the location of her new cochlear implant.
More photos in the gallery.A difficult decision
Five years ago, when doctors first told Greenlee that she was a candidate for a cochlear implant, she told them she wasn't interested.
"This could work for you," doctors said of the cochlear implant, a device named for the inner ear, or cochlea, a spiraling, fluid-filled tunnel lined with tiny hair cells.ALSO SEE
An insurance policy that would cover the procedure was nearing the end of its term. The policy covered 80 percent of the $22,000 cochlear implant and about $20,000 for the operation, testing and rehabilitation.
Electrodes attached, Melissa Greenlee undergoes auditory testing before cochlear implant surgery. Doctors think the device can put an end to her 15 years of deafness.
More photos in the gallery. An emotional travail
After four hours of surgery on his 76th cochlear implant patient in Washington, UW head and neck surgeon George Gates peeled off his rubber gloves, removed his mask and walked in blue scrubs to the hospital waiting room to meet Greenlee's parents.
Her recovery time, while boring, was brightened by the challenge of finding room for eight dozen red, pink, white, purple and yellow roses Beaman had sent. 
Back at her apartment, Melissa has a new challenge to face: What to do with the eight dozen roses she received from her boyfriend, Duane Beaman.
More photos in the gallery.The answer to the question
The room erupts, laughter that turns to tears. Travis Greenlee, a retired California police sergeant, kisses his daughter then bolts for the door. 
Travis Greenlee, Melissa's father, comforts his wife, Barbara, after receiving the joyous news that their daughter once again was able to distinguish sounds.
More photos in the gallery.
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