The silence that entered Jeremiah Harris’ life began two years ago, within a few seconds, in a southeast Colorado field during a routine task on an ordinary workday.

A longtime well service foreman for an oil and gas company, Jeremiah had been in the business for nearly two decades since he graduated high school in 2004.

So he wasn’t worried on that Friday afternoon in October 2022 when he and a colleague set out toward a well site. As they began their tasks, Jeremiah gave directions via a two-way radio to his co-worker manning a nitrogen pump platform. The noise from the pump site is loud —dangerously so —which is why his friend was wearing a pair of PPE hearing protection muffs that include a radio and headset.

It was Jeremiah’s pair that he loaned to his coworker.

“There was no need for me to have the headset on because I was a long way from the noise of the burner on the nitrogen pump,” said the 39-year-old Trinidad resident. “I wasn’t worried about it at that point.”

But then things went horribly wrong. His colleague, fairly new to the job, became flummoxed and fumbled with the controls, and Jeremiah grew increasingly worried at the alarming data in the readouts he was seeing. He knew that if the valves weren’t handled properly, the nitrogen pump could overheat or even explode.

“I was very concerned at this point, as he could hurt himself if opening or closing the wrong valves … I ran to the unit he was in, and with my heart racing, asked if he was OK.

‘’I had put thoughts of myself aside, as I wanted to make sure he was all right. I shut the valves down properly and we had a safety conversation. I wasn’t exposed to the noise level for very long.”

Or so he thought: “While talking to him, I first noticed something was wrong,” Jeremiah recalled.

He had a loud ringing in his left ear, coupled with a ferocious headache. Unbeknownst to him, he soon would be dealing with total hearing loss in that ear that he would have to endure for the next year and a half.

Getting his hands dirty on the job and in Colorado’s four seasons

Raised in a military family, Jeremiah moved to Colorado Springs when he was 4, and then to Trinidad, where he completed high school. He settled down there with his wife, Tiffany, and the couple has two daughters, ages 19 and 12.

Jeremiah likes to stay busy and maintains a strong work ethic. During high school, he juggled multiple jobs: fast food, delivering newspapers, working at a convenience store. All the while, he ran track and was a straight-A student.

A self-taught “gear head”, he loves fixing anything with an engine and is at home in dirt, grime, oil and grease – rain or shine, 12 months a year.

“Nasty weather comes with the job, but it fits my lifestyle. I love being outside and enjoy doing this work.”

It’s a profession he gravitated to after high school as he turned his tassel on a Sunday and started “swinging a hammer in the gas field” on Monday.

Jeremiah knows the ins and outs of what it takes to safely extract gas from the ground with large pumping machines and pressurized tanks of liquid nitrogen. He carefully tends an assortment of nozzles and valves to ensure no one gets hurt.

He never thought he would be the one to get injured. 

What is too loud and how is sound measured?

The human ear is a remarkable and sensitive organ. The inner part is a complex and delicate structure responsible for hearing, balance and our sense of equilibrium. Inside the inner ear is the cochlea, a small, snail-shaped flexible structure surrounded by fluid and sensory hair cells. Sound vibrations create waves in this fluid and in the hair cells, sending signals to the brain and helping make sense of what we hear. But too much sound can hurt these hair cell bundles.

Loud noises can make us feel unsettled and even cause pain. Decibel is the scale used to measure sound intensity audible to our ears. For instance, 0 decibel (dB) is the lowest threshold of human hearing, while 40 dB is an average room noise. Sound below 80 dB is considered safe but above it, potentially harmful.

The noise from the liquid nitrogen pump burner in the field where Jeremiah was working had steadily increased while his colleague was attempting to adjust the controls, registering at about 130 dB or higher.

And 130 is not just a very loud sound — think a jack hammer, a gunshot or a jet taking off next to your ear — it’s also a very dangerous one. Exposure to this level of sound, even for a few seconds, can cause permanent hearing damage or loss if a person is not wearing proper ear protection.

“At first it was a loud ringing noise that I was hearing in that ear. It hurt and was very uncomfortable,” he remembered.

He was able to complete his work for the day, albeit with a horrible headache, and he went home and took some ibuprofen and over-the-counter drops used for swimmer’s ear. Still hoping the ringing and headache would abate, he set about with his weekend chores.

But then, like a child playing with a light switch, his left ear began shutting on and off. Every 15 minutes or so it would pop as if he was ascending in an airplane, along with an intermittent ringing noise that wouldn’t stop no matter how many times he swallowed or yawned.

That Monday morning, he tried to concentrate at work, and while he was inside a mobile command center, he relaxed when for a few fleeting moments his ear “turned back on” and he could hear perfectly.

“I thought, ‘That’s cool,’ and it stayed on for several hours. But then it turned off and never went on again. And it’s just been a ringing since then, along with crackling noises, and me not being able to hear out of it.’’

Jeremiah had sustained permanent cochlear damage from traumatic loud noise exposure.

Caught in red tape and bureaucracy while he copes with hearing loss

For many months that followed, Jeremiah was caught in a byzantine medical maze as his attempt to get to the root of his hearing problem was thwarted by the complications that can occur in a workplace accident when a person’s health insurance is pitted against worker’s comp, which should cover the claims.

To add to his stress, physician referrals were difficult to obtain, exacerbated by living in a rural area where there were long waits for specialists or simply a dearth of care. Insurance hassles meant his medical bills were not being covered and he was growing more frustrated as he faced a future without fully being able to hear.

A hearing test showed his “right ear was perfect, and his “left was dead” and that only a cochlear implant could help.

“I was numb as to what that was and had to look it up online,” Jeremiah recalled.

He was still hoping that a quick fix would be able to reverse his hearing loss, which six months after his accident, was also causing him tinnitus in his left ear, consisting of a constant loud ringing and whooshing sound like a car defroster turned on high.

That sensation, coupled with his deafness, affected his equilibrium and he was often nauseous and had headaches. He tried hearing aids, but they merely ramped up noises in his damaged ear, not improving the clarity of sound but only amplifying it.

His anxiety was heightened by his working in a field that required precision across a wide gamut: from heavy machinery to intricate nozzles, high pressure pumping equipment and gauges.

“There are so many things moving — pushing and pulling forces, pressure and temperatures—all these hazards around me. I was feeling very sad. When you do something all your life and when they ask you to repeat something, and you can’t … there were times I was close to tears.”

One particularly terrifying moment occurred when he was stopped at a traffic light and heard sirens but was unable to discern from which direction. Hearing in both ears is necessary to localize sound.

“What scared me was location of sound. I didn’t know where it was coming from, and I was scared to death. That’s when it became very real to me.”

Finally, with the support of his company, his worker’s comp claim was approved in spring 2023 and he was able to get the medical help he had wanted from UCHealth Memorial Hospital Central in Colorado Springs. A few months later, almost a year after his accident, he was accepted as a candidate for a cochlear implant.

“I was begging for some kind of closure to all the stress and anxiety that was going on,” he recalled. “When I found out I could get the implant and that hurdle was behind me, I was so excited, and I told everyone. It was very, very humbling. I teared up, I sighed relief, and I felt a glimmer of hope.”

Cochlear implant surgery and same-day activation serve as game changers for Jeremiah

After some additional insurance hoops and red tape, Jeremiah waited another six months, until this past February, for the implant.

His UCHealth care team, including an audiologist and a surgeon, determined he would do well with the implant based on:

• A hearing test.
• The fact that he had less than 50% word recognition while using a hearing aid.
• And that his cochlea was not so damaged that it couldn’t benefit from an implant.

“Cochlear implant candidacy has changed over the past five to 10 years, and patients who might not have been able to benefit from them are now experiencing success,” said clinical audiologist Kelley Corcoran who worked with Jeremiah at the UCHealth Ear, Nose and Throat Clinic-Eastview in Colorado Springs. “We are implanting people who have some natural hearing but aren’t happy with traditional hearing aids.”

Because Jeremiah lives hours away from the Colorado Springs facility, his care team coordinated his surgery visits to minimize travel to and from his home. Typically, patients have implant surgery and then return anywhere from a few days to two weeks for activation of their unit by an audiologist.

But Jeremiah went into surgery on a morning in mid-February, recovered for a few hours, and then had his implant turned on and finetuned, leaving the hospital later that same day.

“I’m doing audio tests less than 10 hours from when I went into surgery,” he said. “I left that afternoon, and I was hearing stuff. It just blows my mind how it all came together. It’s amazing, and I owe them so much. They changed my life.”

Less invasive implant surgery these days reduces the wait time between the procedure and the implant activation, which means patients gain the benefit of hearing sooner.

“We offered to do it in the same day for him. In our minds it had already taken a while since he first had the accident, and we wanted to get him the best care possible and as soon as we could. He was open to doing that and we made it a priority to make that happen,” said Dr. Sharon Lin,  UCHealth otologist and specialist in cochlear surgery.

Jeremiah loved getting everything done in a day.

“That is the best way to do it,” he said. “It’s a good hike from my house to Colorado Springs, so to have all of that done within hours, you don’t have time to worry and be anxious. You walk in, and then you walk out hearing.”

Hearing restored in a matter of hours

During the two-hour procedure, Jeremiah was under anesthesia while Lin placed a tiny implant into a small space under the scalp behind his left ear. She threaded a microscopic electrode into his inner ear, which stimulated the nerve responsible for hearing, and in doing so, bypassed the damaged part of his cochlea.

A magnet in the implant was connected through the skin to a magnet in an external processor (about the size of a silver dollar), which is worn behind his ear, keeping the unit in place.

Patients can select from different units, which can be removed while sleeping or bathing, and need to be updated every eight to 10 years. The implant itself lasts a lifetime and doesn’t need to be replaced.

Once the implant was in and Jeremiah had a few hours to rest, he met with Corcoran who turned on the device, fine-tuned it, adjusted the programming for sound and pitches and showed him how to operate it on his own.

“We made it so he could hear that day,” she said.

At first, he said there was a robotic sound to what he was hearing. Corcoran said in the coming months, Jeremiah’s brain will retrain itself to hear with the electrical signal and it will sound more normal.

Since the implant, follow-up tests have shown how much the implant has improved his hearing in his damaged ear: with a hearing aid he had been at 0% for word recognition and with the implant, it shot up to 70%.

While that percentage has recently dropped, neither Corcoran nor Jeremiah is too concerned. She said such variability is common during the first year as patients adjust to the device, and a change in medication to help his headaches and tinnitus also played a role.

“Now he can localize where sounds are in his environment for safety, for work, for just being alive,” Corcoran said. “As humans, we are social creatures and any time we can get back into our social life, our family and friends, the better off physically and emotionally we’ll be.”

Hearing again!

While Jeremiah feels some sadness and frustration about his injury, he is fortified by his faith and the compassion of family and friends.

“I had to wait a long time for it all to work out, and the wind was out of my sails. There were times my heart just sank. But Dr. Lin and Kelley worked with me to make it happen and after a year and a half of waiting, it finally happened.

“I got my hearing back in a day,” Jeremiah said.

These days, he is able to do his job again, and he is relishing simple, sweet sounds.

“There are a lot of things you take for granted until it’s taken away from you. It sounds corny but just hearing ‘I love you’ from my kids. One of the first things I remember after the operation was my wife saying, ‘Can you hear me?’ I had tears in my eyes and said, ‘Yes.’’’