Rae Kung is proud of her cochlear implants. In fact, she specifically chose an earpiece colour that would stand out against her skin and hair.
It wasn’t always that way, though. When Rae began to lose her hearing at age 22, eventually going completely deaf in her left ear, she felt uneasy about surgery and embedding medical technology in her head.
That all changed in fall 2020, when sound swiftly began to fade in Rae’s right ear. Within the span of a few days, the world went silent.
Rae immediately knew where she should go: the Teck Emergency Centre at St. Paul’s Hospital. After a referral to the Audiology Clinic at St. Paul’s, doctors determined that Rae had lost all hearing in both ears.
“It was like the end of the world to me,” she remembers.
Rae’s medical team scheduled her first cochlear implant surgery for March 2021, in her right ear (a second would follow later for her left). She’ll never forget the day when doctors switched the implant on, and her world resumed.
“I was so grateful, I cried,” she says.
Read more about Rae and how she got her hearing back because of St. Paul’s Hospital.