Michael Chorost tells his story of near-deafness, to sudden total deafness, and back again, in My Bionic Quest for Boléro:
And then, on July 7, 2001, at 10:30 am, I lost my ability to hear Boléro — and everything else. While I was waiting to pick up a rental car in Reno, I suddenly thought the battery in my hearing aid had died. I replaced it. No luck. I switched hearing aids. Nothing.I got into my rental car and drove to the nearest emergency room. For reasons that are still unknown, my only functioning ear had suffered “sudden-onset deafness.” I was reeling, trying to navigate in a world where the volume had been turned down to zero.
But there was a solution, a surgeon at Stanford Hospital told me a week later, speaking slowly so I could read his lips. I could have a computer surgically installed in my skull. A cochlear implant, as it is known, would trigger my auditory nerves with 16 electrodes that snaked inside my inner ear. It seemed drastic, and the $50,000 price tag was a dozen times more expensive than a high-end hearing aid. I went home and cried. Then I said yes.
[...]
In early September, the surgeon drilled a tunnel through an inch and a half of bone behind my left ear and inserted the 16 electrodes along the auditory nerve fibers in my cochlea. He hollowed a well in my skull about the size of three stacked quarters and snapped in the implant.When the device was turned on a month after surgery, the first sentence I heard sounded like “Zzzzzz szz szvizzz ur brfzzzzzz?” My brain gradually learned how to interpret the alien signal.
His cochlear implant was software-upgradeable, and he eventually got back the ability to enjoy music.