“Hi Mom, can you hear us?” Holly’s children asked. She hesitated, then softly replied “Yes,” and instantly burst into tears. This was the first time, in January 2024, when she was able to hear a voice after almost three decades of hearing loss. Holly Cain (@holly.cain) had been suffering from Ménière’s disease and for 30 years she couldn’t hear her own voice. And when finally she did, one of her children captured the tearjerker moment in a video that Holly posted on her Instagram. As Holly began responding to their voices, raw emotions surfaced causing the entire family to have a good cry.
Representative Image Source: World's smallest hearing device, handmade from individual ear prints for insertion into the auditory canal, is smaller than a thimble. (Photo by © Bettmann/CORBIS/Bettmann Archive)
According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, Ménière’s disease is a disorder of the inner ear that causes severe dizziness (vertigo), ringing in the ears (tinnitus), hearing loss, and a feeling of fullness or congestion in the ear. Ménière’s disease usually affects only one ear. The root cause behind this disease is the buildup of fluid in the compartment of the inner ear called the labyrinth, that controls the balance of the body. In Ménière’s disease, the fluid buildup in the labyrinth interferes with the normal balance and hearing signals between the inner ear and the brain. This triggers vertigo and other symptoms.
Representative Image Source: A medical lithograph from 'A System of Human Anatomy, illustrates the anatomy of the human ear, 1883. (Photo by VintageMedStock/Getty Images)
The disease is more likely to happen to adults between 40 and 60 years of age. Approximately 615,000 individuals in the US are currently diagnosed with Ménière’s disease. In Holly’s case, she decided to switch from a hearing aid to a cochlear implant to treat her condition. NIDCH defines a cochlear implant as a small, complex electronic device that can help to provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. The implant consists of an external portion that sits behind the ear and a second portion that is surgically placed under the skin, although the footage Holly shares doesn’t reveal any physical signs of surgery.
“My mom hearing our voices for the first time,” read the caption of the video, as it displayed Holly sitting in a chair dressed in grey. “It’s buzzing,” she said to the doctor, while her children kept whispering in the background. “I don’t know what to say,” she said in the moment as her implant was being activated. She was beginning to hear things.
“How does this sound to you?” the doctor asked. She was shocked, overwhelmed, and was still trying to process it, wiping tears that were trickling from her eyes. “Very alien-ish,” she then described the sound. “I can’t really stand listening to myself.” She confirmed that she was able to hear their voices, calling this new state “weird” and “crazy.” The doctor told her that it was simply a part of different sounds, different pitches. “Wow!” Holly said and wiped a tear with a napkin.
“It's amazing how we take our hearing for granted when we're young. So happy that you can hear it again. I found it amazing all the things our brains have to relearn when we can hear,” @nswayze58 said, commenting on the video.
You can follow Holly Cain (@holly.cain) on Instagram to learn more updates on her life.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.