Opportunity Made Podcast Transcript, Episode 6

Steve Borden, The Opportunity to Hear Again

[00:00:00] Steve: Everything changed from this wonderful stereo world into this mono world. And in that moment, listening to Don Henley, I was saddened, but there was something inside of me that said, hey I'm going to move forward with this. I'm still gonna be musical. I won't let that not be part of who I am.

[00:00:25] Katherine: Hello everybody. Welcome to the Opportunity Made Podcast, the show that teaches us how to get unstuck and flourish so we can make new opportunities for ourselves and others on a regular basis. It's all about taking chances, being intentional in our actions and investing deeply in our own lives.

[00:00:43] I am your host, Katherine Lewis. I'm going to give an audio description of myself. I am a European American woman with short blonde hair. Today, I'm wearing a white and blue striped long sleeve, and there's a white wall behind me. I have a special guest with me today, and I'm very excited to introduce Steve Borden, a Media Infrastructure Engineer at LinkedIn.

[00:01:07] Steve Borden's career in media started with recording garage bands as a teenager, and working for an audio, visual, and post production facility after college in Virginia. Steve took his skills in video and audio production, packed up all his things and headed out west to California where he worked at three Los Angeles recording studios. He eventually migrated to video post production and color correction for Sony Pictures Entertainment and Technicolor.

[00:01:35] Currently, Steve works at LinkedIn for the Production Operation team within Content Technology Engineering. The prod ops team provides hardware and software solutions for LinkedIn's content creators in their seven studios worldwide and all remote locations. Hello Steve!

[00:01:54] Steve: Thank you, Katherine. Great to be here. Um, for courtesy, I would like to share an audio description of myself. Hello, everybody out there. I am a Caucasian third generation American with brown hair, brown eyes. Today I'm wearing a black polo shirt and behind me is a light gray wall with a nice glare coming from the outdoor sunshine.

[00:02:14] The current position at LinkedIn, yeah, I've transitioned, uh, been promoted to a Staff Engineer at LinkedIn, where I work for the Production Operations team.

[00:02:23] For those out there in the, uh, cyber world, you may remember of a company called Linda.com. Uh, Linda.com is a learning provider. They provide online learning tutorial classes and they were acquired by LinkedIn, I believe in 2016 or 2017. Some sometime around there.

[00:02:43] LinkedIn saw the value of the online learning platform as part of the quest to follow the tenant of talent is priority number one. So they bought this company to help people learn more and in doing that that division, which now I'm part of the technical team that supports that division, they produce about 1,200 courses a year, anything from Excel to Project Management to, um, how to deal with imposter syndrome. They have a variety of different courses.

[00:03:16] Very interesting. It's part of your LinkedIn premium subscription. This sounds like a plug, but honestly it's a great learning platform. On the back end there are, uh, a number of studios our teams provides software and hardware support so people can record things or do video transcription, audio transcription, screencast recording. My end of it deals with, uh, vendors and project management and staying on top of the market of media tools.

[00:03:48] Katherine: I wanna go to another piece in your bio, which is the garage band that you were in as a teenager. What was, what was that like? What kind of music were you doing?

[00:03:59] Steve: Oh, I'm a rock and roll guy. I started playing guitar very young age. It was an outlet. It was a way to, you know, it's an emotional outlet. Music always has been for me and probably for most people.

[00:04:10] You hear a good song. People are moving their heads. It's like, I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to be able to move people's heads and I wanted to be able to move my head. I played with a variety of people through high school, a different group of people that became a band during college years and then four out of the, well, pretty much four out of the five... yeah, four out of the five people ended up moving to California when I did. It's like we wanted to be the next best thing in rock and roll. Didn't get there. We came close. We had a great demo. Warner Brothers almost picked us up. We had some good songs, but, um, we didn't get there.

[00:04:48] Music's always been part of my life and it does start with that whole idea of like picking up a guitar and connecting with it. Um, I had some mishaps physically when I was younger. I tore ligaments in my leg, so I couldn't play any impact sports like baseball, basketball, or football.

[00:05:07] It's very bad when you tear ligaments, at least the damages that I did. It's like a lifelong kind of thing. So you can do this, but you might injure it again. You, you hold a strong percentage chance if you do that and then, uh, I broke my arm and had pneumonia all within like an 18 month window and hey, I could sit and grab a guitar. And after all that, I was like, this, this is cool.

[00:05:30] Katherine: I wanna drill down deeper into your story though, because I'm thinking about mm-hmm, being someone who's in band in Virginia, and then you're migrating all the way to Los Angeles, all the way across the country. You're young. You're about to get picked up by Warner Bros. What is that journey like and how do you almost get there, but then didn't quite make it and why, and what were you feeling at that time?

[00:05:55] Steve: I grew up in Virginia. I was born in California, but I grew up in Virginia by way of a Navy transfer and did my schooling there. After meeting a collection of musicians in Virginia Beach and then the Tidewater area, it was a small collection of, um, musicians and also working for that audio visual company, we started doing, um, video production and music videos for local talent.

[00:06:18] We, we kind of got to know the local community and the local bands. My interesting was always in recording and I have a degree in Music Composition and we had a recording studio in, in the school that we could use. So I used that to start creating an album. I said I should just buy my own gear. So I worked really hard, bought my own home studio gear that I've had, you know, in various versions all the way up to, to now. So I've had a studio in my house forever.

[00:06:44] The journey about being successful is like it's chasing that dream. It's like, we all chase our dreams. You know, that's comes to this word of, um, an opportunity, your podcast. So the opportunity for me back then is like, well, I've done all I can in this town. I know this music community. I know there's bigger things in California. I'm gonna head west. Everybody thought I was crazy except for my girlfriend who went with me and my parents were like really, you're gonna go. Yeah, we're gonna pack up. We're gonna pack up the U-Haul and go.

[00:07:16] And I encouraged my keyboard player friend and my two best friends come out to California. Let's try it. You know? And if it doesn't work, we'll, we'll be in California. If it doesn't work, we don't like it, we'll come back to Virginia.

[00:07:29] So through that experience, I got to work at some very cool studios. I mean, I got to work at Westlake Audio. I got to work on One on One Studio. It's no longer there. Westlake is still there. I got to work on some Michael Jackson sessions, some Vanessa Williams and what happened was we got to create in, in the off hours, create our own project. I'll call it that because I was writing it the whole time and I was writing with two people.

[00:07:56] So we got to work in the studio that Michael Jackson did and Chicago and just a million musicians have been through Westlake Audio. They have five studios. So we thought, well, hey, we have access to this. We have people that can help us use the equipment.

[00:08:10] We can learn how to use equipment. We know how to use the equipment, but we can get people who really know the tricks of the trade. And we created a really good through song demo that we got out to as many record companies as we could. LA used to have a songwriter showcase and we threw out one and there was like two of our songs whenever they played the songs, this is back in the days of cassette, they'd hit play on the cassette and the cassette would play and it would play through the verse and the chorus of the song, and everybody would listen to it. And then whoever was the listening staff that were invited to listen that week, if they were interested in it, they would grab the tape and pull it and maybe contact you. In most cases, rarely if ever, did you get through a song.

[00:08:54] Um, but in our case we played one of our songs which was like a six minute song, it went all the way through. And so this guy's like I'll be in touch, but nothing happened. So, oh, darn!

[00:09:07] It wasn't the end of the world. It was like, okay, I still need to live. I still need to put food on the table. I still know audio. I still know video. I'm working for a post production company and met a producer who ended up at Sony Pictures and he is like, you should come over here and work on movies with me. And I'm like, that sounds like fun.

[00:09:26] So that led on a journey into working at Sony Picture Entertainment Culver Studios lot and it's the old MGM Studios. It's got a vast history and I worked there for a number of years on a number of movies. I'm a good person to have, um, on trivia night, particularly with movies, cuz I've worked on a ton of movies, not just Sony, but Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal. I've worked on probably 2,500 movies in my color correction years.

[00:09:56] It's interesting to have worked on all these movies, cause movies have a lifespan typically. And if you go to internet and movie database, or like go look on the interweb and, you know, top critics, a hundred movies, movies that are before 1970, that live on Netflix or are streamable are so few and far between, unless they're an academy award winner. And there are some amazing stories that are being told and that, that are relevant back then to now. I mean, um, another Sony movie's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which deals with race and it was a radical movie at that time.

[00:10:36] And it's a beautiful movie even today and people should see it, but it's difficult to see. I had the good fortune to work with some, uh, people in Paramount. They had an extensive library of older film. Film has a lifespan of about 70 to 80 years and it goes vinegar syndrome. That means you open up the can. It smells like a bottle of vinegar. The film starts fusing together. All the movie lots are in this like we need to take all of our film and digitize it and save it.

[00:11:06] So I worked on a lot of movies like that. The oldest movie I worked on was like I think 110 years old, was one of the silent movies. It's like 90% of silent movies don't exist because they were treated like newspapers back in the day. It's like, hey, 10 cents go into the theater, watch this thing that's like maybe three or four minutes, maybe 10 minutes long. And they would recycle the silver out to make the next batch of movies from now. So, so much of our history is lost and to be able to work on some of these original pictures and restore and put some of them back in place.

[00:11:40] Katherine: I have to go back and ask Guess Who's Coming to Dinner has Sydney Poitier right? He's so good. What's the other one? It's the teacher.

[00:11:50] Steve: Oh, uh, where he's a teacher and I transferred that movie too, um.

[00:11:56] Katherine: To Sir With Love.

[00:11:57] Steve: To Sir With Love. I love that movie as well. It's based in England and it's a little different. He's a little bit of a rebel, you know, in, in, in terms of how he approaches education, how he deals with these troubled people.

[00:12:10] It's a fantastic movie. Mm-hmm . Yeah. So if you're ever stuck in that mode where you're like, okay, I've been searching on Netflix for, or whatever your platform is for like an hour, trying to figure out what to think just go to best pictures. You're going to learn something. You're gonna see some amazing stories. You know, movies take us places. They take us away from work. Really good ones inspire us and I was glad to be part of that Hollywood experience for those movies that do that.

[00:12:43] Katherine: That was beautiful. I feel like that was just a good transition place. Let's dive deeper into your story on the music side and the audio side. It has been such a primary part of your life. I know that you have an album coming out in the near future, which is really exciting.

[00:13:03] Mm-hmm tell us a little bit more about what happened about a year or so ago and, uh, what your journey has been like since.

[00:13:14] Steve: Yes. Yes. So in the middle of all this media, that coupled with this love that I have for music that's been lifelong, um, last year in May I lost hearing in my right ear because of a condition called idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss and it never came back and it was a horrible experience and it's still kind of hard now.

[00:13:53] I have some stats here. 60,000 people a year in the United States. So that works out to three people per state per day have some form of sudden hearing loss. Now, when we start talking about my experience in this situation I went profound, which means I completely lost the hearing, in my right ear. And it was something that happened in a typical form like it does with this condition. It's I woke up one day. It was mother's day 2021, Sunday. And I felt I had what felt like the clogged eustachian tube and I knew that that day I couldn't mix music cuz I couldn't hear high end out of my right ear. If you just picture an ear that like, if you get off an airplane and your ear, doesn't quite unplug, that's what it sounded like .

[00:14:53] Maybe you could hear, but it was a little muffled like somebody took the high end and just like took the tone on the radio and turned it down. So it's just kind of could hear, could understand, but not as good as the other ear. The next day by 12 o'clock and four zoom meetings, I lost complete hearing in that ear.

[00:15:14] And at that point I didn't really know the world that I was gonna be going into. Um, I thought it was broken headphones at first. I had these really, really nice headphones from my friend, Stephanie. I was like, well, these are finally broke. And I said, wait a minute, let's take them off and reverse them. But when you do that you're thinking that the right side headphones doesn't work so I took, and I reversed that and I could hear that in my other ear. And I still couldn't hear anything in my right side ear. It's using the left side of headphones. So I immediately called my doctor and for anybody who listens to this, know that this is a medical emergency and it should be treated immediately.

[00:15:58] It is truly a medical emergency. I made a doctor appointment for the next day. And I was convinced that it was gonna be the embarrassing scenario of having a clogged eardrum with ear wax. Some years ago in the same ear, I had a clogged ear and I thought, well, I'm gonna have to go through this again. This is not gonna be fun. That's what I told myself. So I go see the doctor and she's like, yeah, you have some wax it's not bad, but let's do a flush. And she did. And she's like, okay, can you hear, you know, what's it like, and I'm like, I can't hear anything out of that ear.

[00:16:39] And that started, um, a process over the next month. I think I had 24 doctor's appointments. I went to two specialists. I had one ENT then I got a second opinion from Stanford just to make sure that everything you know was looked at. And with sudden hearing loss it affects people in different ways. For me, I went from, I went from normal hearing to completely zero hearing within 48 hours.

[00:17:13] I lost hearing on Monday. On Tuesday, I saw my general doctor, she wanted to call her friend at Stanford. The case was bounced and on that Wednesday, I went in and saw her and I'm like, okay, what do we do? You know, if you're a family member what do you do? And she goes, oh, if you're my family member, I say, we should give you an intratympanic steroid shot. And I'm like, okay, well, you know, what is that?

[00:17:37] It's like, well, we lean you sideways. We take steroids, liquid steroids, and we shoot it through your eardrum, into your ear and hit the area where we think there's some kind of swelling in there that the steroids might work its magic on and help do something. And then we would do maybe three or four of these shots and it sounds horrible. And I was like, okay, let's do that. She looked to the nurse, go get the needle and literally within two minutes, I'm sideways with, um, the first of five intratympanic shots. I had 'em every other day.

[00:18:18] I said, what else can we do? You know, what's my opportunity here, right? Your insurance company probably won't cover it, but let's try hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I'm like, you know, okay. I didn't know anything about hyperbaric oxygen therapy. My doctor's like do 10, do 20, if you can. I'm like 20 treatments. Okay. Well, a treatment is two hours in this tube. So picture something like an iron lung that you're completely encased in. It's pressurized twice the pressure of an airplane and it fills up completely with, with pure oxygen. You have to have cotton undergarments and they give you specific clothing to wear.

[00:19:05] You could either listen to podcast or watch movies. So guess what I did? I watched movies um, because it's the only way you can pass time. They have like a little speaker and at the very end, there's a little portal with a video screen and the outside, they have a video screen and they play movies. So 40 hours of my life was spent inside of this tube pressurized.

[00:19:30] The first day I did it, I've probably felt a lot of pain in my life, but I've never felt the pain like I did in the ear that wasn't working. The second time I went in and did this, I was curious, is this gonna happen every time? And it didn't. Unfortunately for me after 20 treatments over three weeks, I had no benefits from the hyperbaric oxygen therapy. So at that point it becomes a permanent condition.

[00:20:04] Both my ENTs were like, yeah, something could happen in the next year. You might want to thinking about cochlear implantation or looking at different types of hearing aids, but wait till August and at that point, we're gonna call it permanent. Meanwhile, um, my wife puts me on a prayer chain with a, a woman's prayer group that she's in and a friend of a friend comes up a week later and says, I have a friend of a friend who's practically the same age as your husband. She lost her hearing and last week, 60% of her hearing came back after six months, just out of the blue. And I'm like, okay, that's gonna be me. And so at that point we wait, and we wait, and we wait. Nothing happens till August. And at that point I'm deemed single sided death.

[00:21:01] Katherine: When I think about your journey and your love for music, you mentioned at the beginning, how music is an emotional thing in some ways. It's a way to express emotions or feel emotions and the beauty of mm-hmm resonating and creating those songs, going through this journey and possibly having that loss of something that you love, were there emotions. How did it feel?

[00:21:38] Steve: Um, there were so many emotions in that time and I've documented a lot of this with an app called Otter. So I have this whole experience and I hope to eventually maybe tidy that up in collection and maybe make it a story and share it online. The emotions that go with hearing loss, um, it, it, it was staggering for me. It was a major pivot point.

[00:22:08] The first three weeks aside from going to doctor's appointments, immediately starting steroids, which basically the doctor warned me don't buy a house, don't build a house. And I'm like, what are you talking about? A week later it's like, I'm getting three hours of sleep at night. I'm incredibly inspired like, I'm gonna beat this. I'm gonna win. I'm gonna get my hearing back. Like everything is so colorful and I'm not a person that's ever indulged in psychedelics or whatever, but I kind of get the drug thing now because it's like, I would go outside and I'd look at flowers. I'm like, these are the most beautiful flowers in the world.

[00:22:51] So the first three weeks I'm in this jacked up steroid state trying to keep it together, working full time, by the way, um, even through the hyperbaric oxygen thing. And I don't think that was a very constructive period of time. I did not listen to music. I was in a place of probably denial. I think the lowest point was when I was sitting in a parking lot, I had taken my wife and her mother-in-law to a nail salon and dropped them off.

[00:23:29] I would drive around for 45 minutes and just probably had the lowest point cause that's the point I decide, okay. I should probably listen to some music. I know how the car stereo sounds. I've got Bluetooth,. Let's listen to a song. Let's see what this sounds like. And of all things, Don Henley's boys of summer, you know, boys of summer was a song, which is just great lyrically and just loved the production.

[00:23:58] It's just one of those songs of Americana that I really like. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna listen to that. And I got, uh, maybe 20 seconds into it and had to turn it off, cuz I was like, oh my gosh, this is, this is what it's gonna sound like. And we have a good sounding car stereo. And I was in tears for a while and yeah, that that's, that was a low, low point.

[00:24:30] When I went and had my audio test, they plug the working ear and they put tones in the non-working ear and they put one K tone, 10 K cone, a hundred Hertz tone at 110 decibels into my ear and I cannot hear a thing out of it. So that's what they call NR on the audiogram. It's no response.

[00:24:54] So onset of tinnitus, some people say tinnitus they're both proper. I say tinnitus, the ringing started gradually to just being a 24, 7 noisy thing. So that reeks havocs with the emotion, ups and downs, denial. Everything seems loud coming through one ear. You lose localization of sound.

[00:25:19] My wife and I had to play audio tag. I would go into the living room and I would say, where are you? And if she's not around, she would say, I'm here. To me, it always sounded like here was like our master bedroom. So I go in the master bedroom, of course she was down the hall in either her art studio or her office. And whenever I thought she was there, she was always someplace else. It impacted our relationship.

[00:25:46] There's no filtering of background noise with other noises. It all comes in at the same level. On a scale for one to seven for tinnitus, I was rated at a 4.5 where seven's like unbearable.

[00:26:00] So I've been fighting with that and still even now it's back in ways that I don't like. Everything changed from this wonderful stereo world into this mono world. And in that moment, listening to Don Henley, I was saddened, but there was something inside of me that said, hey I'm going to move forward with this. I'm still gonna be musical. I won't let that not be part of who I am.

[00:26:32] I needed to find some disciples so I found four of them: John, Paul, George, and Ringo, the Beatles because their first eight or nine albums were exclusively mono, including Sergeant Peppers. In the sixties, prior to stereo and FM radio AM was all mono. I said, let me go back and learn from those people. So get online three in the morning, I'm high on steroids, I call my keyboard friend who still works at Sony. He set me up with a special cable. I found this speaker that was a mono speaker that wasn't made for five years. I found one just by chance at four in the morning, not kidding. When you can't sleep, you start spending money on weird things.

[00:27:24] So he, he knows things engineering wise that I don't know and he's like, I'm gonna make you a special cable. And then I took two stereo speakers and put it in between that mono speaker. And I can change the audio between the two of those. I started listening to music, um, probably in August of last year and it was hard. The things that sounded best were some of the mono recordings so I started doing a lot of listening.

[00:27:58] Katherine: Going back a little bit, you started talking about the tinnitus and how things were changing and, anyone who looks at you is not going to know immediately unless they see the cochlear implant that you have single sided deafness. And so when we're talking about accessibility and people being able to be empathetic with people's experiences and knowing how sound is now interpreted because you only have one receiver, can you share the story of what it's like to go through a grocery store to illustrate your lived experience of sound in public places so that way people who are designing these experiences can have a bit more empathy as to what someone in your situation experiences?

[00:28:44] Steve: Yeah. I mean, the first time I went to a grocery store after, um, losing my hearing, it was gonna be a quick run during the lunch hour at work. I was gonna take an hour, go to the store, pick up a few things and maybe, you know, grab something from the deli. You go in, this is during COVID everybody's mask mandated and everybody's wearing a mask and go in and for, for people to understand single sided deafness, imagine just being in a grocery store. I'm only hearing through one ear.

[00:29:23] So, um, typically there's music going on. A lot of times, it's it it's kind of loud or at least my perception of it was loud. So that's the first thing going. You have the, um, paging system going on, shopping carts moving around, noisy kids with moms, just people living their life normally. You take all that and you make all that the same volume level and you stuff it into your ear where it's just like the kid yelling on aisle five is going on at the same time as paging system is and then you've got the latest dance song on playing in the background.

[00:30:05] It's overwhelming to the point where I went home and I was in tears. It's like I don't know if I could do this. And the answer to that was get online four in the morning, three in the morning. Oh, let's get Bose noise canceling headphones cuz they have 10 levels of noise reduction and that's how I survived up until I was with cochlear implant.

[00:30:29] You can't go into a public place and expect things to, to, I guess, to change for those people with single sided deafness but it's probably one of the most recurring themes that I see on all the sites. I don't think I've read anybody like, hey, life is good and it sounds noisy. Places are okay. It's just a difficult place to be.

[00:30:53] Katherine: I'm hearing you say that everything is coming in at the same level, all into one ear. Everyone imagines that when you go from both ears to one ear, you just now hear sound out of one ear, but what I think we don't realize when we always have our hearing, is that being able to absorb sound from both ears balances out the audio experience. Once it's filtered through one ear, things get out of whack. It's not just like you're plugging one ear and now only hearing it from one side. It's actually being filtered and interpreted by the brain in a very different way. Can you describe what that's like?

[00:31:35] Steve: Yeah. At that point prior to the cochlear implantation, this is part of that pivot point as Steve. I was a very social and loud person at work, not necessarily loud, but I would hang out with people and joke and we'd be in the break room or go to the coffee bar or at the end of the day on a Friday, or even some of the socials, I'd be one of the people that would be laughing and telling stories. Flash forward, lose my hearing in one ear and not only am I happy that I've been working remote, but as part of my career path I opted to go full-time remote and was able to do that. That was a blessing for me.

[00:32:20] Even now after implantation being in loud places, it's extremely difficult for me to hear other people like going with my wife to a restaurant. One thing I have found that does help is if you go to Open Table, you can say, hey, I have one of our parties hard of hearing.

[00:32:41] The decision with the cochlear implant came after nine months. So by January, my Stanford ENT was the primary at that point. He says you're gonna be rejected by your insurance company because cochlear implantation specifically for single sided deaf people, it's a new thing. I mean, it was just approved for insurance companies, as an acceptable condition I think in 2018 and insurance companies are just going through a tug of war. So he said, you're gonna probably be rejected two times.

[00:33:18] He said, but we'll get you there. It's just part of the process. So I left the state. I moved to Nashville and that's where I started the cochlear implant journey with the full expectation of being rejected three times.

[00:33:34] So I'm no longer working with Stanford at this point. My doctor was gonna refer me to the folks at Vanderbilt to find out unbeknownst to me that Vanderbilt University does more cochlear implantations in the Western hemisphere of the world than anybody.

[00:33:55] The decision was made. I was outside of that nine month window. My hearing's not coming back. So my fantastic doctor did my intake and we spent three hours together. And that was an interesting situation because she's gonna ultimately write a piece of paper to send to the insurance companies, say Steve Borden needs cochlear implant.

[00:34:18] So it was a Thursday. It was a nice spring day. It was beautiful. I'd finished lunch. Did I get approved? Did I get approved? Did I get approved? You play that game Monday through Friday week, one week, two week, three week, four week, five week, six Thursday. By the time I got there, I'm like, I'm not gonna hear for these guys.

[00:34:40] There it was and immediately started tearing up, knew that it was like that door is opening the next door in this journey and went in and told my wife and she started tearing up.

[00:34:56] We just hugged each other and Vanderbilt just jumped into high gear. So April I have surgery. I walk with a cane for two days cuz I have vertigo. And that's another thing, probably not talked about that a lot of people with hearing loss have some form of vertigo as part of the experience.

[00:35:21] The surgery is where they actually put a magnetic sensor underneath your scalp and have a long thread with audio exciter that get inserted, drilled through the skull. This thread goes into the cochlea and basically, um, pushes sound through there.

[00:35:39] Then you go away and you heal for three weeks. You don't do anything. And then you get mapped. And the mapping day was on May 10th, 2022. And that was the day I started to hear again, through the cochlear implant. And it was one year to the day that I lost hearing.

[00:36:00] It was exactly one year to the day from losing hearing, to hearing the strangest set of sounds. A month later, I've gone from not hearing anything. The Martian sounds are less. I'm at 54% word recognition. So I've gone from zero hearing to 54% hearing. And now flash forward here to almost three months.

[00:36:29] It's an unusual existence. So when you see somebody with a cochlear implant on, you gotta understand that they're not hearing things like you are. Um, the best way I could explain it would be this, it sounds like a radio station that's a little fuzzy and out of tune right now. I have one working ear. I have an electronic device that I hear through. They don't work together. My brain hasn't combined them. When somebody walks across the room from one side to the other, I can't tell. I'm basically a toddler in hearing at this point. I'm three months old into a year long journey where stereo hearing may or may not come back. So that's what I'm chasing.

[00:37:25] So how do I make it better? I listen to books I can stream into my cochlear implant directly and read. That's like one of the best things. I'm on my third book right now. I do Ted Talks. I do YouTube. You walk by me, guy's not even like listening. He's just like looking at it and it's got subtitles on, but I'm hearing it through my cochlear implant. Nobody can hear it, but me.

[00:37:50] Katherine: Listening through that electronic receiver and training the brain, hey, you need to register these as words, I've heard that that's part of the process when there is hearing loss and you're trying to gain it back, the brain kind of loses or untrains itself from hearing and recognizing the words and you have to retrain it and, and get that back.

[00:38:12] So when you're saying you're three months old, that makes complete sense. You're having to start a new and who knows how far you'll make it right. Will you be able to get that full hearing skill back? Will it stay at three months? We'll see, but it's just incredible the technology and that's sitting right under the skull.

[00:38:31] I'm just kind of in shock, hearing this whole thing and thinking you could be listening to YouTube and it's just being fed into your brain and no one else even knows what's going on, right?

[00:38:41] Steve: No, I mean, literally I was in the living room sitting there with my phone and basically landscape mode, um, watching a tutorial and the only way my brain could hear that was through the, the Bluetooth connection. So, I'm fortunate to live at this time as is anybody who has single sided deafness to have this as an option.

[00:39:06] Basically on the outside of the processor, it's a battery which powers it, runs the technology on the inside. It has two microphones that converts the sound through some special algorithm that somebody in Duke University gave as freeware to all the manufacturers back in the nineties. He improved it, made it free. Somebody at Duke University said, let me look at the algorithm and went in, this person tweaked it and said, here you go. And that has been the de facto standard. Nobody's been able to improve on that. So all three manufacturers of cochlear implants use that.

[00:39:39] Katherine: Knowing what your profession is, I could see that being possibly a nervous moment. Am I gonna be able to do my job the way that I was doing it? What's gonna happen. Mm-hmm . Any thoughts for other employers supporting people who gain a disability or any reflections on how LinkedIn has supported you through the process?

[00:39:59] Steve: My encouragement would be to model how LinkedIn has handled at least my experience. Again, company tenant is talent is priority number one. I fall into that bucket and had the full support of human resources, counseling services. LinkedIn has a counseling program meant for professionals. In my case, it's like when you're going through a medical emergency and hearing loss, it's gonna affect your work.

[00:40:30] I would encourage employers to embrace the individual's need from basically a management level, a human resource level and say, hey, are we doing enough to hear what this person's needs are? And in LinkedIn's case, they fully supported me through the experience and I cannot thank them enough. And still even now cannot thank them enough. It's a fantastic company to work for. Um, but understanding what the employee's needs are, even if they fall into that gray area.

[00:41:08] Katherine: I am so glad that not only are you able to get the support that you need, but do the work that you're doing, because we've talked a little bit about your work, but I know some other things that you're doing and, and Steve is just killing it, like his, his work is phenomenal and he's changing things across a company for other people in similar situations or different situations with different disabilities.

[00:41:29] On that note, Steve, anything else that you'd like to share with the audience about your journey or words of encouragement for anyone in a similar situation?

[00:41:39] Steve: Enjoy today cuz you do not know what tomorrow will bring. Nobody made tomorrow better by worrying about it. Try to live in the moment. Slow down a little bit. When you work in tech, when you work period, I think we're constantly trying to multitask and do a million things, slow down a little bit and be deliberate in your choices of what you're doing and how you're doing things.

[00:42:04] If I could say anything for the people who are curious about cochlear implantation, know that it's very personal. My experience could be very different from somebody else's. My hearing loss was profound. Some people, when they lose hearing, they lose part of the spectrum.

[00:42:23] It's part of this diversion that's happened to me a year ago and the first year was tough, not hearing, but coming into the second year of relearning, how to hear, I'm more encouraged cuz I'm not the old Steve, but I'm a newer version of me that has a lot of the old Steve in there. But even my wife said you've changed in some ways.

[00:42:46] And I have.

[00:42:49] Katherine: You're creating this momentum that is going to guarantee you get some answers. You may not know them yet, but just because you're taking advantage of opportunities and putting in the work and moving forward rather than staying still.

[00:43:03] And thank you for going into detail because not only is it great for maybe someone who is going through a similar experience, but there's so much to take away. I think about companies and businesses and creators of spaces who can think about the sound and the audio of what it's like for people of all hearing abilities to walk into a restaurant or go through a grocery store.

[00:43:25] I just really appreciate this conversation and you taking time to share your story, so thank you. Any way that people can continue this conversation with you.

[00:43:33] Steve: I work for a company called LinkedIn. So you can look me up. Steven Borden on LinkedIn, Media Infrastructure Engineer, reach out and message me.

[00:43:41] Katherine: If you are listening to this, thank you for spending time with us today. I love meeting up with good friends and sharing new ways we can all create more opportunities in the world. Just by you being part of our audience tells me that you're someone who likes to create new opportunities, too. So if you have a story to share or know of someone who was once stuck in an area of life and is now creating new opportunities for themselves, please reach out on social media @OpportunityMade.

[00:44:11] You can find us on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook and tell me your story or reach out at opportunitymade.com. When we tell stories, not only do we create opportunities for other people, but also for ourselves. That's what this is all about.

[00:44:28] Serve widely, give greatly and take care y'all.