Anybody been diving with a Cochlear Implantee?

[Nursediver]

Hi Gaffer Tom! You may not remember, but my hubby is facing the same issues. His ENT doctor told him he could dive with this implant should he choose to have them. If surgery is an option for your type of hearing loss (it is for hubby), that is a situation where you can never dive again or the pressure can destroy what the surgery corrected.

Good Luck!

 

[DiveMonkeys]

Hi,
I was reading your post from 2012 regarding cochlear implants and wondered if you would share some information about your experience to date. My wife is considering cochlear implants and can only find information that guarantees the equipment up to 1 ATM or 33 feet. We are involved in cave diving on a regular basis and often dive technical profiles that exceed decompression limits. As you had reported DAN doctors are saying 4ATM, but that may be related to information put out by the manufacturers rather than knowledge of people with implants and diving experience. Most of the studies that we can locate indicate that the testing was done for a non-implanted device in an increased pressure environment--not necessarily underwater. And, the manufacturers rep says that durability with cycles of pressure is essentially unknown beyond 10 cycles.

So, we would be curious to know if you dive on a regular basis--how often--how many dives on consecutive days--depth of dives, etc.

We can be reached at drbryan@vetcoach.com

Thanks in advance for any information you might have to share.

Bryan Buescher
Temecula, CA