Cochlear implant pioneer making noise

From: Iowa City Press Citizen, IA
Oct. 31, 2002

Freshman plays in UI's Marching Band

By Heather Woodward
Iowa City Press-Citizen
Sometimes, the impossible becomes possible.

Tim Brandau proves it.

A University of Iowa freshman who celebrated his 19th birthday Wednesday, Brandau was the first child born congenitally deaf in the United States to receive a cochlear implant. Now, he plays alto saxophone in the University of Iowa Hawkey Marching Band.

"It's fun to prove that a deaf person can play in the band," he said in a recent interview.

"Seeing 70,000 fans in front of you, it's a huge thrill. It's the ultimate."

Brandau, who hopes to major in biomedical engineering, is from the small northeastern Iowa town of Rudd, population 431.

Just before Brandau's fourth birthday in 1987, doctors at University Hospitals fitted him with a cochlear implant - a device that electrically stimulates nerves inside the ear enabling the wearer to hear.

Until that time, cochlear implants had been reserved only for children who had lost their hearing after being born, which meant they would have had some memory of sound.

Doctors were not sure whether the device would help Brandau learn to understand language and speak normally, since the 3-year-old never had been able to hear.

"This was a risk to take with Tim and his parents," said Bruce Gantz, a UI professor of otolaryngology who joined the Iowa faculty in 1980 and installed Brandau's cochlear implant.

"We didn't know if this would work."

Today, UI doctors have fitted more than 150 children and nearly 600 patients altogether with cochlear implants.

Once Brandau's was complete, its success still remained unclear for several years. First, he began responding to noises. A year later, he began making speech sounds.

"It was a very difficult, long process," Gantz said. "By two years, we realized this was making a major difference."

Gantz gets a thrill from watching Brandau succeeding as a college student, living life without an interpreter and speaking almost normally.

"Deafness is such a struggle in a hearing world," Gantz said. "And he's conquering that."

In fact, Brandau cannot imagine what direction his life would have taken were it not for the cochlear implant he received more than 15 years ago.

"My personality might not have been the same. I don't know if I would have had the same GPA," said Brandau, who eventually wants to earn a master's degree and might seek a job working for a company that makes cochlear implants. "There's a whole wide world of possibilities."

© 2002 Iowa City Press Citizen