Client Story: Marcia & Mike’s Journey

Transcript:

Leah: Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition, brought to you by Nutritional Weight & Wellness. We are a Minnesota based company that specializes in real food nutrition education and counseling. My name is Leah Kleinschrodt, a Registered and Licensed Dietitian and your host for the show today.

My colleagues and I meet and work with real everyday people who want to leverage their food as a way to help them get the most out of their lives. That quality of life looks a little bit different for everybody. This could look for one person like improving their ability to get around with less back pain or less knee pain.

For someone else, it might look like reducing urgent trips to the bathroom so you can actually put something on your schedule and know that you're not going to have to work around it, then for someone else, it might be getting through the winters with only a minor cold or two instead of getting taken down every couple of weeks with a major illness. Really, as the longer I do this work, I am continually amazed by the power of real food to nourish and to heal and to revitalize.

And today we've got a really inspirational story to share with one of those real everyday couples who are out there in the world doing their own form of powerful work, supported by a backdrop of nourishing real food. So Marcia Norwick and Mike Mullins are both lifelong musicians and are recipients of cochlear implants for hearing loss, though each of their journeys with hearing loss looks a little bit different.

So they now pass on their knowledge and their personal experiences along to their peers as passionate volunteers for Cochlear Americas, and they support people who are considering or who are entering into the world of cochlear implants.

And to be really honest, they're better storytellers than myself. So I'm going to be letting them tell their intersecting journeys of food, music, and hearing. So we're so excited to have you guys on the show. Welcome Marcia and Mike.

Mike: Thank you.

Marica: Thank you. It's pleasure to be here.

Leah: Yes. So I think maybe just start to start us off, I want to set the stage and have you guys just tell us a little bit about yourselves. Like where did you grow up? Like what are your families like, what did you do for careers? How did you get started in music? because that's both a huge, a huge part of both of your guys' lives, and what do you do to fill your days today?

Background on Marcia & Mike

Marcia: I grew up in South Dakota. My dad was a car salesman, and my mom was the typical homemaker back then in the fifties. I had two brothers and one special needs sister. My career, I was a middle school guidance counselor, which I loved dearly.

I did that for 38 years. I always loved music. In fact, my brother would be playing the 45 records all day long, and he loved music. I love music. So I think that's how I gained the knowledge of music, just listening to all those 45’s and we enjoyed that together.

Leah: It sounds like a fun household.

Marcia: It was. We were playing Frosty the Snowman in the heat of the Summer. And yeah, music was always being played. I started playing the clarinet when I was in fifth grade and I was in the band and, and I enjoyed it. I guess, you know, my level music just, has always stayed with me.

Leah: Mm-hmm.

Marcia: I did minor in music in college and, and I now play in a, a large community band, and I, I sing in a, a senior community choir. So, you know, I, I get my, my fill of music, which I, I love. And, what I do to fill up my days, music and Mike and I are, are volunteers and we mentor, people who are interested in getting cochlear implants.

We get referrals from, engagement managers and we mentor people all over the United States. It's been very interesting and rewarding hopefully giving them information they need.

Leah: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, That sounds like a great way to give back and to pass on some of the learning that you had to do and make it easier for people to come. Okay. Your turn, Mike.

Mike: Well, I grew up in West Virginia, and when I say that it's a rural state in and of itself. But, then I narrow it down to say I grew up just outside of Charleston and then just outside of St. Albans. And in reality, I grew up in a little neighborhood called Tornado, West Virginia.

And we had a general store that had a post office, and that's what we had. There was six kids, five boys and one girl. And, I would say we were generally normal, at least from our perspective the boys were involved in a lot of different things, in the community and, sports and various, things.

The music, however, I think, comes a little bit differently than it did with Marcia, and I want to point out that the music is important in this particular conversation as it relates to our cochlear implants and our hearing loss. And that will make more sense when we talk about that. But my family was a musical family.

My dad played trumpet. He played in a dance band through the forties and fifties and all the way up into the late sixties. My mom played flute, played the piano, and we had the good fortune to hear them perform those things together. But we sang also and I think families back in the fifties oftentimes would take a Sunday drive and the first three kids would participate in those drives.

And the second set of three weren't around yet. So we could do those kind of things. But when we'd take a drive, we'd sing and, my sister and I would harmonize. And we learned to do that early on. And everybody said we were pretty good. I don't know if we were or not, but, we started believing it.

Through this period of our family singing and playing instruments, I did start doing vocals in the church and solos as I progressed to high school, I was a soloist to my high school, choir and a friend of mine and myself started a little folk group we performed throughout high school at assemblies and talent shows and so forth.

And from there I started college and believed that I wanted to be a music major and I was pursuing that. I was the tenor so lowest in my college choir. But then it occurred to me one day that I probably wasn't going to make much of a living at that. Hollywood wasn't calling on me.

I wasn't getting any opportunities to cut a record. And there were just a lot of very good singers and musicians out there. So. I switched my major to business, but I never stopped performing music. I spent a summer in an outdoor drama where I was a musician and an actor.

And, I even had the good fortune, in the late sixties, to be a vocalist for my dad's band. He was playing trumpet and we played dance music. And then I got to do old songs and torch songs that I thought were really kind of cool. I'd sat on a stool and just sing to the crowd, and I loved doing that.

Career wise, I joined IBM and became a programmer analyst and was with IBM for about 25 years in middle management. And I moved around a great deal. And from there when I left, I took an early retirement from IBM, then I went to grad school and, got a degree in counseling and social work so that I could change careers completely.

It was different but exciting. And I became the director of Child Protection in Allen County, Ohio. And then from there I became a CEO of an organization called Adriel Schools that provided therapy and schooling for kids that couldn't make it into mainstream. Plus, we had a foster care network.

And what I do, Marcia’s already covered, the kind of things that we do. I do volunteer with Cochlear and act as a mentor. But we do that together, and I think we complement each other when we do talk to people all over the country. She didn't mention that we do ushering. Now we do it when the mood hits us;

To usher for the Lakeville art community. We also do presentations at senior centers to talk about our hearing loss. And the things that we've done and what it means to have a cochlear implant. I volunteer at my granddaughter’s grade school and, I guess overall we stay busy.

Leah: Absolutely, yeah. No shortage of things to keep you out of trouble. Yeah. Great backgrounds. Thank you so much for sharing. I am curious if you guys are willing to share, just tell us a little bit about, you shared some great stories or just some things about your home life growing up.

Background on their food environments growing up

Tell us a little bit about the food environment growing up. So, did your moms make home-cooked meals every night? Did you learn how to cook? Or were there more convenience, processed foods? How did you approach that as adults? Just tell us a little bit more for your personal journeys with food.

Marcia: My mother always wanted to be a doctor. So she did a lot of reading about nutrition. Growing up, every morning we'd have eggs, bacon, toast and orange. And we couldn't get out the door to go to school unless we ate all that. But she would explain what the nutrients in each item was.

Leah: Lesson at breakfast every day.

Marcia: Yes. But, her cooking was just simple things. I didn't grow up with a lot of gravy or sauces, you know, it was just wholesome food and a lot of liver, which Mike doesn't like, but she fixed it in such a good way.

You know, I really liked liver and I still do, but, we had a lot of nutritious meals. So, growing up I had that as a role model. But unfortunately, when I got to be an adult, I got into the diet stuff, a fat free and only counting calories and not reading labels.

All I knew was about the calories And as an adult, I, signed up for many different weight loss programs, spent a lot of money, ate a lot of their foods, and then when the food was gone and I went back to normal eating, of course I gained the weight. And it was just years of that in my adult life. And, anyway, always counting calories, but not even thinking of the nutrition or what I've learned about bad oils or any of that. I started out with a good background, but joining the forces of Nutritional Weight & Wellness, you know it's taken me back to wholesome food.

Leah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of interesting and we'll get into some of that, how you got in with Nutritional Weight & Wellness, but yes, very interesting how it comes full circle. Kind of getting back to some of those grassroots of like, how did we eat when we were kids or like, how did our parents eat, grandparents ate, things like that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What about you, Mike?

Mike: I mentioned that we grew up in a very rural type of environment. So having a garden was something we did and something the six kids learned to work with and work in. So we always had, fresh vegetables. And even in the wintertime, my mom did a lot of canning.

So we had beans and corn and various different beets, pickles, things that were canned and we ate those all year long. And my maternal grandparents did the same thing, and they had an even bigger garden than we did. So we did a lot of that. And I don't think we talked about nutrition so much as we talked about a balanced meal and make sure you have your meats and your potatoes and your veggies, and whether that was good or not.

That's what we did. And some of the things, I was a skinny little guy till I was 11 years old and I didn't like any vegetable. They had a problem getting me to even taste them. I hated beets and didn't like green beans. And, didn't like peas. But somewhere along the line they started to taste good to me and they started eating them.

My mom was a stay at home mom and did these kind of things, cooking and providing meals, but then she went to school and became a nurse, and she was gone a lot. So the six kids did have to learn to sometimes make dinner, certainly to pack her own lunch, to fix her own breakfast.

And probably some bad habits were started then. I loved cereal. I loved Cheerios and Wheaties and ate a lot of that. And it already had a lot of sugar, but I would pour even more sugar on it. And I think my brothers did a similar kind of thing because we got ourselves off to school often and we'd pack our own lunches.

And our, can't say that our lunches were necessarily nutritional, but that just happened to change as our family dynamics change. And then when I graduated from high school, I worked in a place called The Burger Boy, which was kind of a forerunner to the Burger King and McDonald's and some of the others.

And we didn't eat out much at all when we were kids. That just isn't what families, blue collar families did in the fifties. But once I, learned that French fries at, these fast food places were wonderful, I just started a steady diet of French fries and hamburgers, and I did that all the way through college.

When I joined IBM, then I also started traveling a lot and was eating out a lot. And I never, ever worried about, probably got more salads because you tended to get that in a restaurant. But I never much worried about, what I was getting and whether I was getting French fries or what it was cooked in or the oils.

I just never worried about that. And nutrition was, was nowhere near the top of my thought process when it came to eating. So probably starting out traditionally as a family did in the fifties and into the early sixties, but it changed considerably as my mom went back to work and the dynamics changed.

Leah: That makes a lot of sense. And again, at Nutritional Weight & Wellness, we talk with families and moms usually about that. It’s a lot. When we have busy families, both parents working, sometimes kids having to kind of fend for themselves a little bit more, it's just kind of easy to fall into some of those habits or get into some of those grooves.

So Marcia, you were the one who first got connected to Nutritional Weight & Wellness. So just give us a little bit of that background. Like what put Nutritional Weight & Wellness on your radar and what was it that you finally decided, oh, okay, I'm going to make an appointment. I'm going to come see somebody.

Marcia’s reasons for coming to Nutritional Weight & Wellness

Marcia: Well, in 2018 I was diagnosed with the beginning of macular degeneration. And I was terrified. My retina specialist had told me, just take the eye vitamins and green leafy vegetables and that was it. No hope for things getting better or, you know, just, I was terrified, and I thought surely there must be something that I couldn't do something more.

Because I didn't want to, five years down the road, find out I should have been doing something else other than what I had been told. So, I always had band practice on Sundays and, at six o'clock I was driving home and I had the radio on in the car, I happened upon this Dishing Up Nutrition.

I thought, hmm, boy, these ladies really sounded like they knew what they were talking about. And everything they said made sense. And there was a reason for everything. You know, if we're feeling fatigued, there's a reason for that and something you can do.

And I thought, I wonder if they could help me with my macular degeneration diagnosis. And so, it just clicked with me and I thought, well, I better find out how I can get ahold of the clinic or, start, asking questions and seeing if I could get the help that I was looking for.

And that's how I started. I called to make an appointment and. I got a real bonus. I got to see Dar. And, you know, it was wonderful meeting with her and I thought I finally have some hope. She did a thorough assessment, had me fill out all those forms. So that told me that she really wanted to come up with a good plan for me nutrition wise. And, because I was truly scared and I was looking for some help.

Leah: Yeah.

Marcia: And she provided it.

Leah: Yeah. And especially in that first meeting where you have those forms, again, we're always kind of thinking and trying to look at things from all different angles, like, so we're really kind of considering the whole picture, the whole person. So yes, you're right. You kind of you got somebody who's just like tons of years of experience and getting connected with Dar was great.

Marcia: It was.

Leah: Yeah, so Dar, I know Dar, and Dar is known to pull out all the stops when it comes to encouraging, changing eating habits. So I'm curious, when you were first getting started with that part of your nutrition journey, do you remember what kind of changes you had to make right away, or that you were encouraged to make and like, do you remember anything being like a little harder or some things being easier? I'm just curious what was your experience?

Marcia: Yeah. As I said, my focus was on macular degeneration, so right away dirt taught me about the good oils. I didn't have any idea about soybean oil, cottonseed oils, sunflower. I just thought that, you know, and then they would advertise one being so good and, and none of them were.

Leah: Those are the more refined oils that could create inflammation in the body, especially in the eyes.

Marcia: I had never heard that before but right away, you know, that made sense to me. And then I listened to the podcast with Dr. Knobbe. Wow. I mean…

Leah: Yeah, that's a powerful episode.

Marcia: Wow. Very powerful. And I thought, I don't know if these doctors know about this, but I want to tell them. But I mean, that was so comforting that there was something I could do, and I could control. And his podcast is just wonderful about his research and how the damaged oils, you know, damages the retina and probably the ears too.

So, wow. And I did purchase his book. It's just excellent. And he said, it's not easy reading. It's not, but you, you know, I have to look some of the words up, but it's very good. And you asked me about what changes. So that was an easy change. I learned how to read labels what was difficult was, I guess my mindset and I was given permission to eat butter, eat full fat, and I thought, I'm going to gain 500 pounds if I do that.

Leah: Yeah. I could tell the listeners right now, you're not sitting here in front of me at 500 pounds.

Marcia: I had been so concerned about losing weight my whole life. When I grew to adulthood my whole life was dieting. Rather than a better way of feeding my body and nourishing my body and nutrients. I was just so focused on losing weight. I had permission to eat nuts and Dar told me I could have…

Really? I hadn't had that since I was a child. Yeah. So I know the information and I, I can't say that I made all the changes right away. I did with the oils. That was a no brainer. I was motivated. and I can tell you after seven years of reading labels and good oils, yesterday I saw my retina specialist and my eyes have stayed the same. So, I mean.

Leah: That's, it's amazing.

Marica: That's enough proof for me.

Leah: Yeah. That's wonderful and I think this is a really great place; we're going to take a quick break. We're going to pick up on the other side and just talk more about some of those nutrition changes and just what you noticed and things like that. So hang with us. We are going to take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment.

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And we are back. So, I'm going to stay focused on Marcia here just for another minute or two. So Marcia, I mean, you've stayed engaged with Dar and Nutritional Weight & Wellness since 2018, so that's a good like seven years or so by now.

So you came in wanting to address the macular degeneration. I'm curious now, what keeps you coming back? What keeps you engaged and are there, like, have there been different focuses over time or has that shifted over time? I'm just curious.

Marcia: Yes. Well, my body's getting older, and I have, I wouldn't say they're new issues, but just the same issues that maybe weren't addressed before.

Leah: Sure.

Marcia: And I know that I can contact Dar whenever I have a health concern and I have been keeping in touch with her by phone. All my life I've had chronic ear infections, and then I've taken so many antibiotics over the years, even as an adult. And then I was having a lot of UTIs.

Leah: Yes.

Marcia: And just, get one cleared up, but then another one. And I thought, I just can't keep taking these antibiotics. And, so I, of course I called Dar, what is wrong? What do you recommend? Of course, she recommended probiotics. And she knew right away how to help me. I mean, she's just amazing. And they worked like a miracle.

And also, she put me on Key Osteo Plus for my, my bone density is slowly getting better. So, I don't think these were new things, but things that I had been dealing with and, I guess I just felt that I needed some help with it. It couldn't keep going the way I was, especially with UTIs. It was really awful. So that's, I just feel like Dar is my person. And she'll always be with me.

Leah: Yep. She's not going to get away that easily.

Marcia: That’s right. Yeah. I appreciate her so much. And the work that the rest of you do too.

Leah: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Probiotics, I, I've met with clients kind of like that too; just get into those cycles of UTIs, yeast infections, hit repeat and it's a gnarly kind of cycle to kind of break through. But you're right. The probiotics, especially acidophilus, I'm sure that was part of protocol.

Marica: Yes.

Leah: We have a new one called Women's Biotic Balance that we've been using with clients.

Marcia: I do take that one.

Leah: Yep. Exactly. Like all those types of things absolutely can be game changers for, for men and women.

Marcia: What a blessing. I'm just so elated that she knew right away.

Leah: Yep. Yes. Very good. Now, somewhere along the line, you meet Mike.

Marcia: Yes.

Leah: Yeah. Tell us that story. How did you end up meeting each other?

Mike: Well, I can start with it, but, first of all, I have, I've had hearing loss for probably 30 years. Mm-hmm. And, I finally faced that realization and, started wearing hearing aids but my daughter-in-law who lives here in Minnesota, and I was living in, Columbus, Ohio at the time, my daughter-in-law was receiving all of my mappings or all of my audiograms whenever I had a, a visit to the audiologist.

Leah: Because she's an audiologist, right.

Mike: She is an audiologist, by trade, but she's also now a consultant with cochlear.

Leah: Oh, yes. Mm-hmm.

Mike: And she actually sits in on the surgeries of the hospitals that are in her area. And, and she sat through mine when I had the second one, a few months back. But she knew even seven or eight years ago that I was a candidate for an implant.

But my audiologist at the time, wasn't trained on implants, and so she didn't believe that I was. And through Christie, I got hooked up with the Ohio State University Medical Center, and they discovered quickly that indeed I was a candidate. And when I became an official candidate, then one of the things Cochlear does is set you up with a mentor.

Marcia: Since 2014.

Mike: So Christie invited me up and I did make several trips up during the year to visit with Christie and my son and granddaughter. One of the trips in September of 2019, she set up a meeting with me and Marcia; Marcia having the music background, but also having a cochlear implant was the ideal person for me to talk with about what I could expect and what it might do for my music or to my music. And so we met at a little coffee shop in Lakeville. And Marcia showed up with this big bag of all kinds of paraphernalia for…

Marcia: I was there on business.

Mike: Anything I'd want to know, every, every pamphlet, every,

Leah: You were going to be convinced.

Marcia: It’s good to be informed.

Leah: Yep.

Mike: And I was, but to make the story short, we continued to communicate as mentor/mentee. And, then COVID hit and surgery was delayed. And I was starting to back away having second thoughts about it. And Marcia then got with Christie and the two of them decided that something needed to be done. She remained encouraging to me and she gave me one of the best pieces of advice that I could have gotten.

And that was to journal everything that was happening with me and believing that if I journaled, I would remember all the reasons why I had decided that I needed a cochlear implant and I needed to go a step beyond the hearing aids. And we just continued talking. And we discovered once that our phone calls turned into three hour phone calls and we discovered that we were talking about much more than just cochlear implants. And we became friends and, and we became more than that.

Leah: Yeah.

Mike: So that's my story.

Leah: Did he summarize that well?

Marcia: You did very well. And we've teased Christie that, you know, a matchmaker, but, yeah, it was all business. And then, I mean, I'm just so pleasantly surprised that you moved here and you're my partner. The very thing that I thought ruined my life, my hearing loss brought me this wonderful man.

Leah: Yeah. So very good. You, so Mike, you moved up from Ohio up to Minnesota.

Mike: January of 22.

Leah: Yep. 2022. So we're still a little earlier in the COVID pandemic. So you're joining forces now at this point. And by this time, Marcia’s been working with Dar and with Nutritional Weight & Wellness now for at least a couple of years. So now we have two forces coming together and having to share meals and cooking and shopping and things like that. So tell us a little bit more, like, what did, what did you think about eating the Weight and Wellness way?

Mike: I’ve got to be honest. I had met this wonderful woman and she helped me considerably when it came to my implant. And, we enjoyed all this time we were spending together. And then I discovered that our trips to the grocery store took twice as long because Marcia read absolutely every label.

And I think I might have mentioned to you before, the only thing I read on a label was the number of calories and what the size of the portion was. And that was all that was important to me. And then when we started cooking and doing various different things and the things that I used, the canola oils and the flours and so forth, and they, didn't necessarily match up with what Marcia was doing.

But I did listen and I did pay attention and so I have changed so many of the ways that I do things because. She's not as goofy as I thought you were.

Marcia: So thank you. I'll take that as a compliment.

Leah: Yes. it's a transition. It's a learning process, but each of you, I think compliment each other very well. And like, who does some more of the shopping. Who takes over in the kitchen and like, you guys have good teamwork in that sense.

Mike: Yeah. And probably I do a good bit of the cooking, but I'm cooking more in the fashion that makes sense for Marcia. Because it also makes sense for me as well. And I've grown to understand that. And I joke about what it was like, but it really was a good change for me in what you brought in the way of nutrition and the kind of foods we ate.

I was taken back by Dr. Knobbe’s podcast with Dar. And Marcia introduced me to the podcast a while back. I was just amazed with what he had to say and the way he gave the history of, not just macular degeneration, but other diseases that seniors struggle with now that they didn't struggle with a hundred years ago.

Mike’s reasons for changing his eating

And it just made so much sense to me. I think that was an awakening, a kind of an epiphany for me that, I really did need to change the way that I was doing things. Two weeks ago, I went to see my retina specialist. And they did all the testing and all the photos of my macular.

And, sure enough, it stayed the same. So for switch months now it's been stable. I don't believe that it will ever correct itself. I don't think it will reverse itself, but if it stays stable the rest of my life, I will be one happy person. I attribute to what I've learned from Marcia from the podcast with Dr. Knobbe and, that that's the reason why the age-related macular degeneration has stayed stable. I'm confident that it will continue to stay stable if I do the things that I'm learning and do it consistently.

Meal/snack ideas from Marcia & Mike

Leah: Well, we change kind of some of those food inputs, it changes that inner biochemistry, and we can make choices as to whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. So, give us a peek into your guys' kitchen. What do you like to do for some of your meals, snacks? Are there any recipes in particular you make on repeat, you know, and any tips or tricks that you have for listeners?

Marcia: I am a simple cook, you know, not sauces or anything. I’ve never really done sauces because I've been dieting all my life. But, I like to use a crockpot. He's a better cook than I am, so I just have to come up with some good recipes for you with almond flour and some good ingredients. But we like to experiment and we really try to have a salad. We just buy the bag salads, so we don't have to wash it or anything. Easy to take it out. Just make it simple.

Mike: Yeah. Lots, lots of salads. And even if I'm cooking, Marcia generally is in charge of the salad, so she'll make a salad for both of us that will compliment the meal, so an awful lot of salads now.

Marcia: More than you've had in your life.

Mike: But even simple little things like breakfast and doing scrambled eggs or an omelet, but putting green leafy vegetables in it. And that's a way that we can get our greens if we don't have a salad that day. We know that we're getting what we need from the green leafy vegetables. I've learned to enjoy that. It's a nice meal. And I'm using mostly ghee to cook the eggs in. And I still like having a piece of bread with it or an English muffin with butter on it.

But I think that's one of the biggest changes we've made in the way we have breakfast and serve breakfast. I can cook red meats, I can cook chicken, I can do a pork roast. I can do fish. But I'm cooking it in a water solution. And then when I brown it and it just makes it a little more attractive to sear the meats that we have, but I can do that quickly on a hot skillet with ghee or with butter.

And so that's something significant that we've changed. I'm trying to, I still have potatoes, but I'm not pouring tons of cream and various different things into the potatoes. I can do just boil potatoes and put a little butter on them and get what I need from that.

Leah: Yeah. Yeah, sounds like some great proteins and the leafy greens you mentioned, like great source of antioxidants and just some of those really great nutrients for the eye, for the retina, for everything like that. And then we, I mean, we've touched on the fats a couple of times. You mentioned you, like, you tell me more about like what kinds of fats do you keep in your pantry and in your refrigerator. You've mentioned ghee, you mentioned butter. What else do you keep on hand?

Marcia: Coconut oil, avocado oil, olive oil.

Mike: I think the only thing we have up in the cabinet, we're keeping the ghee in a pantry, not in the refrigerator. But we keep avocado oil and olive oil in the cabinet. And those are the only two oils there. We will occasionally use, we fry bacon, but it's got to be, nitrate free. We fry bacon and have that with breakfast occasionally, but we can also cook in the bacon grease that comes from that. So that's, that's a change for us. And the bacon is good. Nitrate free bacon works just fine.

Leah: Yeah. Again, that just kind of hearkens back to some of that old wisdom, the way grandma and grandpa cooked and stuff like that. I remember that from my grandparents.

Marcia: Yeah. And the other thing I like to do is have smoothies and then I use the Key Greens Powder.

Leah: Oh yeah.

Marcia: I’ve got to get Mike on board with that. He doesn't like anything green.

Mike: She starts out with such a nice looking smoothie with strawberries and bananas and blueberries, and I'm all into that. And then, then she does something to them and, and they turn unappetizing.

Marcia: I go to the dark side and put greens in there. She'll always hand it to me and ask if I want a drink. And I always politely gag.

Leah: She puts a little too much in the potion for you. So, again, it sounds like a really great smoothie either way. But those Key Greens are another great way of, we're just looking for a little boost in antioxidants and they taste good depending on your taste buds there.

But great way to just boost up the antioxidants a little bit to combat some of those fires of inflammation that we find ourselves in sometimes. Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing.

Their journey/background with cochlear implants

We're going to pivot away from the nutrition side of things a little bit. And you guys have shared little bits of this throughout our conversation so far. But just love to hear more about, from each of you, just what your journeys with hearing loss has looked like and how you actually ended up with cochlear implants.

And again, what I would actually love to hear more about is how does someone get to the point of a cochlear implant versus, I think most of us think about like hearing aids, like that's your, either your first step or that's your both, your first and your last step. So just a little bit more background from you guys.

Marcia: I've had hearing loss all my life. As a baby my mother talked about, I had a lot of ear infections. When I was five, I had a really bad ear infection in order to clear it up, and so the eardrum wouldn't burst, they lanced it and typically, the eardrum heals. But all growing up I liked to swim in the lake, a lot of ear infections years and years of ear infections, antibiotics, and a lot of problems with my ears. But in college I did manage to minor in music.

And I, I'm pretty sure, like birth until like college, you know, I had moderate or mild hearing loss. And in college I started wearing hearing aids and, that right ear still had the hole in it. And I had a lot of problems and more ear infections. So finally I had that eardrum patched, and it made it safer, but it didn't restore hearing.

And so wearing hearing aids, and they worked for a while, but then they didn't. At that point, I was offered a cochlear implant in my right ear. I have moderate loss in the other ear, so the hearing aid is still serving that ear. So I got the cochlear implant in 2014 at Mayo Clinic, and I was part of a study there, and I had been asking for help all my life, you know, just some help with my hearing because it was tough.

It, it, hearing loss affected my learning, my self-esteem, but I think back in those days, mild hearing loss wasn't considered anything major. But it was, but anyway, so getting the implant was just a, a life-changing event for me. And I really, we have a lot of lessons that we, we can practice with how to talk on the phone, how to, follow conversations. Just a lot of practice. And, you know, I'm, I'm a retired teacher, so I believe in homework.

So I did a lot of homework and, and Mike has done a lot of homework too. But it was so well worth it. And I can now talk on the phone with that. And I could never talk on the phone with that ear ever in my life. So it's been a process, but you know, I just call it lifelong learning and it keeps getting better.

And I've had my implant since 2014, and I just marvel at the things I can hear. Like, I can be downstairs and I can hear the alarm clock upstairs. I mean, never in my life did  I think anything could give me that, but it's, I call it a miracle.

Leah: Yeah.

Marcia: It's just. Amazing.

Leah: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and especially again, both of you as musicians and music being a huge part of your life, that just adds another layer of appreciation for something like that.

Marcia: I mean, that certainly was the bonus, but that's not what I was looking for with the implant. I just wanted to be able to follow conversations and hear and, you know. I just wanted better quality of life, which I do have.

Leah: Yeah. Amazing.

Leah: Yeah. Okay. And Mike, your story's a little bit different, so tell us a little bit more for you.

Mike: I would have what you would call late onset hearing loss. And probably about 30 years ago, I started, I probably denied that I was having hearing loss, but other people knew that it was happening. And, with me a big part of it is what I lost music wise. Because even before I had my first hearing aid, I was with two of my brothers and their spouses and we were attending a small concert, just a little chamber group.

And I pointed out to my brother that the flutist was not in key as she was playing off. And he listened a bit longer and he said, no, she's perfect. She's right where she should be. And that's when I learned and realized that, I was not hearing tones correctly and pitch correctly. And the B sounded like a C. And if you're not able to separate the sounds, then you can't get the melody and the harmonies and the chords.

And I reached a point where music became ugly for me. And that was devastating in so many ways because I'd been so much involved in music, although that wasn't my career. I had still been performing up to that point in various different ways. And also performing with my brothers and the music that we made when we were together.

And I had to quit doing that. I couldn't, as a vocalist, I could no longer start a song on pitch. I couldn't play a note or a chord on the guitar and start where I knew I should be starting. I could hear it, but I couldn't, or at least I could imagine what it should sound like, but I couldn't hear it.

And so I just simply completely moved away from music and quit performing. I quit going to concerts. I quit going to musicals. And, so my life was deprived of something that I grew up with and that was so much a part of my life. But like Marcia, I would say the same thing. Even though music was so important to me, what became more important was my ability to carry on a conversation, to be able to take a phone call, to be able to sit in a meeting of peers or a board meeting and hear what was being discussed and being afraid that maybe I've heard something wrong or something has already been answered.

Maybe I'm saying yes to something that I should never have said yes to. And that may sound a little amusing, but the reality is, it's frightening when you think in terms of not being able to hear what's going on around you. And I discovered, and this can happen to a lot of people with hearing loss, I started to withdraw.

I quit, I quit going to lunch and dinners. And, I started to withdraw from all the volunteer work that I did from sitting, sitting on boards. I was on my way to becoming a recluse. And although the hearing aids helped for a while, even those stopped doing what I needed them to do. And that's when I reached the point when my daughter-in-law assured me that I was a candidate, and the Ohio State Medical Center agreed with her, that's when I finally found some recovery from what I had lost and so I received my first implant.

By the way, everybody who has hearing loss is not necessarily a candidate for an implant. And some people may go all of their lives with just hearing aids, and they function just fine. But when you reach the point like Marcia did, and like I did, when the hearing aids can't do it for you and your quality of life is deteriorating, then you've got to do something different.

And that's what the implant did for me. it was amazing that when I received my implant in June of 2020, and then I was activated about 10 days later. I could hear words immediately. And that was an emotional experience to be able to all of a sudden hear words that I hadn't been able to hear.

And then I had my second implant six months or so ago. I'm hearing pretty well. I'm functioning again and I'm volunteering again. And although I'm not performing music, I'll still try it and I'll maybe sing at church and Marcia will tell me whether I'm singing on key or I'm off pitch and she has permission to do that.

Marcia: Yep.

Mike: For the most part, I'm hearing music correctly. I can go to Marcia's concerts and I can hear the harmonies and I can follow the melody in both her band and her choral group. We both, go to the St. Paul's Symphony Orchestra. It's beautiful again, and as a result of my implants, I'm hearing the different sections and the harmonies and I thought I'd never hear that again. I may never perform again, but if I don't, I'm good with that as long as I can hear music and enjoy it and celebrate that, so that's what it's meant to me.

What is a cochlear implant?

Leah: Yeah. Again, like just a huge change of quality of life for both of you. Can you tell us a little bit, just a quick synopsis, like what happens when you get a cochlear implant? Or like, what is it exactly? Because again, like we think about hearing aids, like, they're kind of like, they sit on your ear and like there's a device that kind of goes inside the ear, but how is a cochlear implant different?

Marcia: Well, there is a surgery, but it's same day surgery.

Leah: Mm-hmm.

Marcia: And, what they, there's an internal part and they make an incision in your scalp, and then they placed, it's called an array of electrodes around the cochlea. Because our little hairs around the cochlea had died.

Leah: Yep.

Marcia: You know, and they're responsible for sound and hearing. So they're replaced by these electrodes. So that electrode array is placed around on the cochlear, and then, they activate it before they close up that incision to make sure it's working.

Leah: Mm-hmm.

Marcia: So then you go home providing that you're not nauseous or have some issues. I fortunately didn't have any nausea. You can't drive yourself home, of course, because you have some painkillers in your system. And a good thing, but only needed those one day and then I didn't need them, just took Advil, after that, or Tylenol.

So that was one day, and then two weeks later you go in and you get the external device that's placed on the outside of the head. And that is like an amplifier and that enables you to hear. And because it works with the internal piece and Mike heard words right away. My experience was I heard what I believed were words. It didn't sound like Mickey Mouse like some people’s experience.

But I had no idea what the words meant. My feeling is, and this isn't a medical diagnosis, that because I didn't have good hearing in that ear all those years and all the infections and the damage in the ear that it, it would just take a little longer. But each person is individual how that turns out. But I can now talk on the phone with that right ear. And never in my life could I before.

Leah: Yeah. I imagine there's like some fine tuning involved in those like maybe weeks and months after you get the implant. Like how long until you reach kind of your maximum potential? You said it's probably individual for everybody, but what does that healing or kind of like that relearning process look like?

Mike: We make sure that all of the candidates that we mentor, and Marcia has mentioned that we talk to candidates all over the country, and we want to make sure that they understand that this is not easy. It requires a lot of work. And it means listening in different kind of ways. For instance, when I was activated on the right side, I heard words immediately and I was able to have a conversation with my audiologist, who did the activation, which for me was wonderful to be able to sit there and hear what was happening.

It was a little robotic sounding. It wasn't normal sounding, and it's become normal sounding. But Marcia has said, and I will agree, that sometimes your audiologist might tell you that you'll reach maximum benefit in six to 12 months. I just don't believe that. I think it's an ongoing process and that you continue to improve and do different kinds of things.

And I mean, even now we both listen to music and when I stream music, I'm streaming, first of all for the enjoyment, but also for the educational part of teaching my brain to hear the music and hear it correctly. And so from my perspective, it doesn't stop. The training doesn't stop. The work doesn't stop.

And I suspect that even after two or three years with the left side, I will still be learning. And I'll still work on it and I'll still do everything I can to make it better than what it is.

Leah: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love that. And it sounds very much parallel to a lot of, like you mentioned, your nutrition journey, a lot of people's nutrition journey.

Like there might be a kind of a big leap at some point, but then we're always kind of constantly tweaking, fine tuning, there's always something new to learn, something new to practice. Just trying to continually get better in whatever ways we can.

Mike: Sure.

Leah: Yeah. if you guys could leave the listeners with like one or two parting words of wisdom or thoughts or anything, and this could be about nutrition or just overcoming some of those life challenges or reigniting those passions, what would you say?

Mike: Well, although I joke sometimes about the nutrition and what Marcia and I have been through, but we both understand what that really means and what I've learned from it. I hope anybody that listens to this, from a male perspective and a guy who's done something for 78 years and now trying to change what I've been doing, it isn't easy. But I think that it's important to look at what you either can prevent or what you're trying to correct and you're never too young to start that.

And for instance, I hope that my three sons listen to this podcast and recognize that there, there may be a way that they can prevent ever having to worry about macular degeneration or maybe through nutrition there's a way that they'll never have to worry about memory loss or dementia. Anybody listening to it, especially guys who are macho and believe that they don't need to make these changes, I would just say learn and listen and take advantage of what's out there because there are things that you can correct with the proper nutrition, the proper oils, the proper vegetables.

And proof positive. Because my macular degeneration is stabilized. I think that's all that anybody needs to hear and needs to understand, and I hope people will take advantage of what they hear and what they learn here.

Leah: Yeah, absolutely. What about you, Marcia?

Marcia: Okay. I think there's such a parallel between, for myself, my hearing loss and, the diagnosis of macular degeneration and, and changing how I eat. There's a lot of work involved with both, as far as eating right, spending a lot of time at the store, reading labels. It's an investment in yourself just like all the practice that we had to do, so we could make these cochlear implants work for us and training the brain.

I guess we need to train the brain to make good choices with the food that we put in our body. and I think we need to remember to be kind to ourselves. I know sometimes I get frustrated with myself and, you know, I have this knowledge, why can't I just do it?

Leah: Yeah.

Marcia: You know, everything takes time. Making changes is a journey, a lifelong investment. And a better quality of life, it takes time. But we need to keep moving ahead. Don't give up. There are days that we get frustrated with our hearing and I get frustrated that I want that apple pie, but you know, we just have to, to keep our goal in front of us because there are a lot of rewards.

Mike: And I would add that if anybody can change his or her reading habits which I've done, if I can do it, then anyone can. So it can be done.

Marcia: Yes.

Leah: Yeah. So many little nuggets in this show. And Marcia, I think you put a really nice bow on it too, of, like you had mentioned before, a lot of changing. It is changing the mindset, changing how, like reframing things. Yes, it's a lot of work, but there's a lot of benefits to be had on the other end. And we both said like lifelong learning. I think that's another key takeaway from today is like lifelong learning. It's never too late to start and we're always constantly practicing, fine tuning, doing our homework, learning something new and reworking that into our lives.

So this was an awesome conversation. I'm so happy we had you guys on. And I want to thank you both for being on the show today and just sharing your stories, both the nutrition side and with the hearing loss and the cochlear implants. And I have no doubt whatsoever that there will be listeners that are going to want to listen to this on repeat and there are be a lot of takeaways.

And you're, you are going to change lives with this show. I think a lot of people will take this to heart. So I want to thank you both for being here. I want to thank our listeners for tuning in today and for everyone here being a part of that real food message. It's a simple yet powerful message that eating real food is life changing. So make it a great day.