Six months since her cochlear implant surgery opera singer Janine shares the recent joys she has felt.

• Hearing waves crashing on the shoreline in Sri Lanka
• Hearing the vicar’s sermon midnight mass in church on Christmas Eve 
• Hearing the Tunes and words at a stunning Phantom of the Opera matinee
• Just Hearing full stop.com

Since her operation in July 2019 and switch on in August Janine - whose hearing started to deteriorate when she was 18 - has seen her world change.

She explained how she felt before the implants: “Deafness is not life threatening, but it is quality of life threatening. It causes horrendous anxiety and concentration fatigue.  Like the effects of learning a foreign language, one feels utterly overwhelmed by the end of the day. Eventually your brain short circuits, you glaze over, and you just have to switch-off.”

Over the last six months Janine has been on a “miraculous journey of the brain learning to translate what I will now be hearing electronically into what I once heard acoustically.”

For someone who has lived and loved music the improvement to hearing music has been a huge boost and allowed Janine to joyfully sing along with some of her own recordings.

She’s made her first phone call and tackled airport security on a Far Eastern holiday.

As Janine’s hearing journey continues she celebrates International Cochlear Implant Day with renewed joy.

She added: “It’s the understanding of just how much I have been missing all these years. Combined with an overwhelming gratitude that it is all being returned to me.

“My implants are without doubt the best thing that have ever happened to me in my entire life.  Being bionic is an immeasurable blessing. Life just doesn’t get any more amazing than this. Cochlear Implants rock.”

Janine has the Cochlear CI632 implants and the Cochlear Nucleus 7 processors

Read Janine's previous update here.