So during March last year I was messing about with writing stuff on Medium – mainly about my experiences with going through the cochlear implant process.

I also wrote an article thanking my wife Debbie for supporting me over the years in my ongoing battle and challenges with progressive hearing loss.

However, when it became clear that Medium is no better, and in some ways worse, than other ‘social’ platforms in creating filter bubbles and designing things to keep you hooked and distracted, I dumped it 🙂

Therefore that public expression of gratitude disappeared too 😦

Given the tumultuous events of 2020, which had always been milestone for my previous blogging activities, I’ve since decided to revisit and relaunch my old blog

I started it originally back in 2009 and it was called “2020 Visions – Imagining the World my children will inherit”

As you can see, the reinvigorated blog is called “Beyond 2020 Visions”.

Anyway, coming back to the gratitude, I’ve said many times how lucky I feel to have got my implant operation done via a standby cancellation before the first pandemic lockdown hit us. Given the coverage about the massive backlog of non-critical/essential operations now building up it could have been very different and, quite frankly, soul destroying story.

As it is, the operation at the beginning of last year was just the start of what has been a long process of learning to hear again.

And, once again, Debbie has stood by me resolutely during the many months it has taken for the implant results to come close to being the ‘big fix’ it promised to be.

Once again, she has had to put up with me having virtually no useful hearing, repeating herself endlessly, having to make all the phone calls, encouraging me to follow the implant centre’s advice and constantly reassuring me that it will all be worth it in the longer term.

Added to this, there have been the ongoing and growing pressures of the pandemic, which have largely fallen on her shoulders in maintaining The Bump Company business and also helping resolve some major hassles in selling my old family home.

The selling of that property was always key to completing the last piece of the hearing puzzle by giving us the funds to buy a unique, and therefore not cheap, hearing aid solution that is the first in the world to connect directly to an implant processor.

As of yesterday I became the proud owner of this very solution – an even smaller hearing aid than anything I’ve had before that is rechargeable, provides superb sound quality and connects to the implant processor to allow direct streaming from my iPhone to both devices in a simultaneous and balanced way.

A year ago I made a conscious sacrifice to opt for the long term stability of the implant operation at the expense of being able to listen to music in a natural way in the way the dual advanced hearing aids had allowed.

I hoped that this advanced bi-modal approach would give me the music back again (for the 4th time) but there were no guarantees.

When I sat in the audiologist’s office yesterday and she played some classical music as a test I felt tears welling up as they had done back in 2013 when I got my first pair of advanced hearing aids.

Needless to say I am now writing this connected to Spotify and thoroughly enjoying listening to music again.

There is one person to thank for this, now and always, my amazing wife Debbie !!!