Hearing Matters Podcast

From Misdiagnosis to Advocacy: Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster's Inspiring Path

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Imagine discovering that a simple misdiagnosis dramatically shaped your early years. That's exactly what happened to Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster, our guest and Director of Audiology Sales and Marketing at Redux. Mark takes us through his journey from a childhood misinterpreted as developmental delays to the revelation of his hearing loss at Children's Hospital Boston—a turning point that fueled both personal and professional growth. He navigates the intricacies of deaf culture, explores genetic underpinnings like Connexin 26 in his family, and stresses the life-changing importance of accurate diagnoses.

As Mark recounts his high school years with hearing aids and the monumental transition to cochlear implants, we hear about the hurdles of living in a predominantly hearing world. The challenges are numerous, including the emotional and social aspects of needing to self-advocate. Mark shares the poignant moment when he realized hearing aids were no longer enough, prompting a life-altering decision for a cochlear implant. His story is a compelling mix of personal resilience and family adaptation, illustrating the emotional and practical aspects of embracing new hearing experiences.

Mark's professional journey is equally inspiring, showing how he brings personal experience into his work with Redux. Mark celebrates the community and technological support that have been foundational to his success, highlighting the importance of connection and innovation in the field of audiology. Join us for this episode full of insights and inspiration as we explore the intersection of personal challenges and professional triumphs in hearing health.

Connect with the Hearing Matters Podcast Team

Email: hearingmatterspodcast@gmail.com

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Blaise M. Delfino, M.S. - HIS:

Thank you. You to our partners. Cycle, built for the entire hearing care practice. Redux, the best dryer, hands down Caption call by Sorenson. Life is calling CareCredit, here today to help more people hear tomorrow. Faderplugs the world's first custom adjustable earplug. Welcome back to another episode of the Hearing Matters Podcast. I'm founder and host, blaise Delfino and, as a friendly reminder, this podcast is separate from my work at Starkey.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Good afternoon. This is Dr Douglas Beck with the Hearing Matters Podcast, and I am here today with my friend, Dr Mark Campbell-Foster. Dr Campbell-Foster is the Director of Audiology Sales and Marketing at Redux and Mark has over a decade's experience as an audiologist. And Mark is a particularly interesting guy and he's got so much experience with hearing loss, cochlear implants, hearing aids, and so I wanted to interview Mark and share kind of his experience and how he got to be where he is today as the director of audiology sales and marketing at Redux. So, Mark, thanks for being here.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Thank you for taking the time to interview me as well. It's always a pleasure chatting with you.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Well, thank you.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

I appreciate that.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Now I don't want to give away your age, but I'm going to say that you're younger than me and we'll say mid-40s, and so the reason that's important is because you were misdiagnosed as a child, about 40 plus years ago. So tell me a little bit about that. What was the misdiagnosis and how did that get corrected?

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Yeah.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

So it's an interesting story and I always, like I prefaced it, that I hear my mother tell the story versus like how I would tell the story is the opposite side of the thing.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

So I'm 43 and I was born in 1981 and I had wonderful parents, but they married very young. They married just out of high school, age 19. And they had their first child at 21, my sister. And when my sister was three they discovered that my sister had hearing loss, and that was the time that I was born, and so you know my mother's like well, what about the chance of my second baby having hearing loss? And so they actually did do a lot of hearing tests on me and you know we have records looking at like from six months and on that show like some hearing, good hearing, usable hearing, hearing suitable for speech development, things like that. But over time, like I wasn't progressing with speech and things like that, and so it wasn't until around like age four that my mother would refer to a center that focused on the term of the day, mental retardation, and my mother was very taken aback by that.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Oh sure.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Absolutely. She was like you know, she knew something wasn't right, but she didn't think that you know, like she always talks about mother's intuition and so she took me to Children's Hospital Boston and they had this wonderful psychiatrist on staff she's still there and she was like you know what? I'm going to bring you downstairs just to have a hearing test done, and and I met at that time a wonderful woman named Dr Sandy Cleveland. And I met at that time a wonderful woman named Dr Sandy Cleveland. She was the first one that just, really, like, kept raising the volume up and the decibels until I could respond and positively do a great test, and so that was really where my hearing loss was really discovered, and how old were you at that time?

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

I was just shy of five years of age and, like I, it was had already affected, like my development to going to school, like I mean, I can literally remember it was funny because when I went to Holy Cross, that was where I did my undergrad I did a concentration in self-death studies and I never really even knew that there was a culture you know and that's really no disrespect to my parents or anything like that Sure, sure you know at the time, but I had no idea it even existed. But I remember learning about deaf art and there was this image of this dog laying on a rug and surrounded by people sitting on couches and it was like portraying, like the deaf person, that's like the dog, where everybody's talking around them and they're missing out. And I remember, just like I wish I could quote who this artist was, because I had never like related so much to what my early experience was like, like just being a being present but not having an idea of what I mean language was like.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

And it's kind of astonishing when you think about that now, because at that age you know that's a little bit beyond where the language window closes. So the thing that comes up first I wonder if you actually had normal thresholds at birth, because of course you know you might have had cytomegalovirus, cmv, and many of those children will test normally at birth and then over the ensuing years and months develop very significant hearing loss. That's totally possible. Could have been some other process. Who knows? As an audiologist, as a doctor of audiology, when you look back on your own history, what do you think the diagnosis was?

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Well, interestingly enough, genetics was a factor that never really came into play for my sister and I. It wasn't something that was offered when my parents were raising raising us but it was something that was offered as we got older and I never really looked into it.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

But I did um 23 and me and the health section of it sure, and, and the thing that was great about it, I did it years ago and they had did a um a report that said I most likely had hearing loss and, um, well, they refined the report and they've actually said that I actually have connexin 26. Which makes total sense.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Yeah, which makes total sense. And you know obviously there's no crystal ball. I have a really great auditory nerve, like I do so wonderfully with my cochlear implants and things like that, so you're probably 100% right. There's probably better hearing there and it's just like progressively gotten worse. Yeah.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

And then you wore hearing aids for a number of years through high school, and what was? What are your recollection of that? What was the best, what was the worst about that?

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Being late diagnosed with hearing loss really just affected so many things. So, like you're dealing with the social, psychosocial aspect of now, all right, you've just had a new diagnosis thing. So, like you're dealing with the social, psychosocial aspect of now, all right, you just had a new diagnosis, now you're going to be fit with hearing aids, and oh, now you got to go jump into your education and so there was that whole social aspect and I just really remember feeling like how different I was, you know not, and just trying to blend in it, be as little different as possible. You know, of course and I'm sure I could have said that more eloquently, but, like you know, some of the things that were like that still stick out to this day is that like I would have to change hearing aids at school to put the FM receiver ones on the wire that would pull out, and I would have to have the teacher wear the receiver and she would always complain that she didn't have a pocket to clip it on and she would have to hold it in her hand.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Could you imagine, could you imagine a teacher today saying well, I have a student with special needs, but I don't want to have to wear that microphone because it's a pain in the neck for me.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Or the fourth thought oh, it doesn't go with my outfit, oh, my jewelry, like you know, like okay, so I have to tell you every time that your clunky necklace is banging up on it. And that's where it's like. You've got to really be a confident person enough to advocate for yourself.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

And you know, and sometimes I'd rather blend in than always be advocating for myself- and I can tell you that you know I've said this to many patients over my four decades as an audiologist and I still say it, you know is that you have to be your own advocate, because if you wait for others to jump in and help, sometimes that's just not going to happen. You know there's no capital recombining. You've got to take it upon yourself. That's so hard for so many people to do, because if you're an introverted, quieter person and you like to just blend in, it's hard to raise your hand and say Mrs Smith, I'm sorry, but I need you to move that microphone over. I mean, it's a very, very difficult thing unless you have, you know, the wherewithal to do that and everybody's different.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

When I taught what we have at Northeastern for like 10 years, that was the biggest thing that I could tell anybody was. You have to empower your patient. They get mad at me instantly. They think I'm not. And I yell out at them I'm like I'm deaf, you know, and like I don't care, like because you know they are so unilaterally thinking that I'm just ignoring them, when they haven't thought there could be something else here, you know, and so it's just like little things like that. Like I might be passive, aggressive in the moment, but that's one of my ways of like advocating, you know.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

So then, when you were about 22, I think it was 23, you got your first cochlear implant and I think that was so tell me about that. So you've been wearing hearing aids at that point for 15 years. And what was the? What was the difference? All of a sudden, with cochlear implants?

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

You know. So the thing was that my hearing was never quite as stable as my sister's was, and so you know, I had a hearing loss in about age 16 where I had to go from the. You know, and I'm actually kind of surprised that as a kid I had in-the-ear hearing aids but probably talked medically to appeal to me and adjustment. But at age 16 I had a shift and that really meant like what, what, what this means my education do I have to like change, like there was a program at um Newton North High School that used sign language, and so it meant earlier I didn't know about deaf culture, like I knew about sign language, but I didn't know about a community, and so, like, um, but I advocated for myself that I was going to challenge, to go to mainstream high school, and I was able to make it work with hearing aids and a little bit more assistance and I did well. But it wasn't when I went to college that I came home on break and I can still remember the moment that it was in a harm moment that something had changed.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

I was sitting in the family with my mother and she was on one couch and I was on the other and um, we happened to be watching tv, the commercial were playing, and next thing I know is, uh, I'm getting swatted on the shoulder and she's like, why are you ignoring me? And I'm like, what do you mean? She's like I've been calling your name from across the room and that's when I, like I had lost my feature noise recognition. Really, it had really gone down because I couldn't understand her voice through the noise of the TV. And so I had gone to have a hearing test.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

And that was when they said you know, mark, we're at the end of the line for your hearing aids, and if you ever want more, then you need to consider a cochlear implant. And that was. I had been immersed in this hearing world and that's kind of what I felt. And now I was being told that hearing aids were the end of the line, and what's interesting is that I had been told by an ENT that that was never going to be in my future. You know, people say all sorts of things, right, when they are comforting families, but that was something my mother held on to, and so, for her, when I was told that I needed an implant, that was another step of mourning for her.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Yeah, and it's a personal crisis, to be honest, in my viewpoint, because we all have things. You never know what the other person is going through. You never, ever, know what somebody else is going through. And when you're dependent on hearing aids for 15 years and then you're told as a young man that hearing aids are not going to work for you anymore, that's a personal crisis. And the fact that you are eligible for cochlear implant, that's nice, that's good, that's great, but that's a whole other world that you have no knowledge of.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

And Doug, I'll tell you it was such an emotional experience. Not so much. Well, I'll tell you it was such an emotional experience Not so much, well, I'll tell you, I say this, but the first one. I actually chose to do the poor ear first because I didn't want to give up my better hearing ear with the hearing aid, sure, but when I went bilateral seven years later, that decision was so hard I was, like you know, I was an audiologist at that time Like I was.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Like you know, I understand, like, quantitatively, that I meet standard, but what about qualitatively? What if there's something just about using the natural system? Like I had this great Oticon Sumo hearing aid that I loved, like it would like. I think it's like I romanticize this hearing aid when I think back on. It was like I think it's like I romanticize this hearing aid when I think back on it and I can remember, like just rolling down the volume and watching TV when the light below it gave me just enough to like get what I wanted from the TV, and I just remember being like, am I going to have this from the implant? And so getting the second implant, which meant giving up your second year. That was a big deal, and I mean but the brain is the most powerful thing, doug, and that's the thing that I can't express enough is that my mother's voice, when I heard it at age five with hearing aid, to when I heard it bimodally to how we hear it bilaterally, is exactly the same Now I want to.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

I want to make clear that I think it's always important to say, because a lot of people are going to be looking at this video, and when you have cochlear implants, that's fantastic. Cochlear implants are not new. First ones were done in 1959, and my mentor, dr Bill House, did three of them in 1960 and 61 in Los Angeles. They were approved by the FDA in 1986, I believe, for adults, 1990 for children. So it's important to understand. We've had cochlear implants for about 65 years now. But the thing is now they are digital, now they are digitized, now they have directional hearing, they have noise reduction programs and they've come a long way. In the last 15 or 20 years we've probably seen more progress in cochlear implants than we did for the first 40 years.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Now the other thing I always like to say is cochlear implants do not give you normal hearing at all and, as a matter of fact, you and I talked about this a while ago and it's the same observation Ashley Brogan from Canada has made. When you take your implants off at night, you're deaf again, right, and that's kind of a shocking revelation for many people with implants. Right Now, tell me about when you had the first implant. How long did it take until you could understand speech?

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

And Doug, you hit the nail on the head. I mean getting a cochlear implant. I mean we made a long way but it's still an adjustment period. And what I'll tell you, getting my first implant, it took me a long time. So the way I describe it is that like sound to me can represent color. And at that time, like when I was hearing through the implant, it was just dark plant, it was just dark like, like, and it took me, like I want to say it took me about six months before it just started to get clear and I can remember it started small things, like it's funny because you remember things this stage of your life, right, and so I can remember being in this um, in my parents den, and all of a sudden I heard the phone ring and it was all of a sudden I could see, I heard a color and I could see red come through and I was like, oh, there's meaning in this sound now, and there was one that the brain finally, like, started to reconnect those dots.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

So I mentioned Sandy Cleveland, who had diagnosed me early on. Well, you know back then, well, we have the strong component to it. It still is now, but they wanted you to commit to three to six months of a program. And while I was commuting to well, I lived at college which was an hour away from where I was having the surgery, so where was I going to have the all rehab done? And a blast to my past, sandy. Cleveland reconnected and said I'd love to work with you again, mark, if you remember me, and of course I me, and of course I did, and it was like full circle. But I remember she really challenged me and to work with the implant and I would late get into therapy and I was like I'm going to have to call her. But instead of relying, I called her on my implant and I literally was like are you happy, sandy? I'm calling you on my, on my, with my implant here, and you and and I can still remember it wasn't that's great today but I was like wow so.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

But the second year ramped up much quicker because the first year had learned.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

But so so and it's. It's so cool that you relate that to colors. That's actually called synesthesia. When one perceives colors, you know light or visual images as sound or might have a tactile sensation and perceive that as hearing, and so synesthesia is a thing. I wrote an article on that. If you go to douglaselbeckcom and look on synesthesia probably 10 or 15 years ago, but it's not uncommon there are many people who are synesthetic and that's what you're describing. And then you worked for Cochlear. They are obviously the big dog in the Cochlear world, Cochlear implant world. I don't mean dog in a bad way, I mean they're the big 800 pound gorilla in Cochlear implants. And you worked for them for about 10 years as a clinical territory manager. What was that like? Counseling people who were new to cochlear implants?

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

It was a wonderful opportunity because you know you don't often get to meet someone who's like walking in your steps. You know, oftentimes when you go see an audiologist they most likely have normal hearing, and it was really nice to be able to be a resource to people adult, kids, family, the like just so that they could see that the power of implants. I do like to your point earlier, though. I mean there are FDA indications to what make you qualify and you know averages are about 50 to 60% and word understanding, and so I just like to say that you know coconut plants are great but they're not everything and you're going to still have to lip read and speech read and do that. And so one thing I always like to show is that you know there's a wide variety of implants.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

So sometimes as an audiologist I felt a little bit like I could be doing a detriment. Sometimes Like I felt and this wasn't quite to your question, but, like you know, when I was doing newborn hearing screenings and not to gave the yards or threshold ABRs, rather at Mass Eye and Ear, and when I had to diagnose a baby with central neural hearing loss, sometimes the parents didn't want to be looking at me because they didn't want to see a healthy deaf guy. They wanted to mourn that this deafness sucked for their baby. Now I'm not saying deafness sucks, but for I'm going to speak for my parents. When they had me, they just wanted a healthy hearing baby, boy and girl. Like you know, and morning my hearing was a big thing and so sometimes I felt, like you know, while I could be an inspiration, I could be a little too much, too soon for some of these people.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

That's an interesting observation and I should note that about 95, 96, 97% of all children who are actually born deaf are born deaf to normal hearing parents. I like what you said there in that it's a very personal and a little bit off the mainstream reflection because we don't often think about that. But maybe you doing that was a little bit too much too soon. That's clever.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

I just always wanted to be careful that I was never forcing, like if they, you know, implants wasn't a thing for them hearing. Like I just wanted everybody to always feel comfortable and it's always supposed to be about the patient right. Like I never willingly talked about my hearing loss at all, but it would inevitably come up and I think that was one of the joys working with Cochlear that I could explain my experience, which would often help with just avoiding having to connect to the computer because it was just a little bit of like oh, yeah, yeah, I I think that's when I met you, when you were with cochlear.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

I was, I was speaking at some meeting somewhere and and I was walking around the exhibits and I met you and I thought, oh, you know, very, very cool that you were doing this, because there were audiologists around the table speaking to you and you know you were not just talking about the product, you were living the experience and that was very cool.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

So in 2022, you hooked up with Redux and became director of audiology sales and marketing. For those who don't know what Redux is, it's a brilliant tool. It's a hearing aid dryer casing that you can use personally or commercially. You can buy it for yourself at home if you're a patient, and many, many clinics use it to instantly take the moisture out of hearing aids, which is a huge problem because you take most hearing aids and they fit deep in your ear canal, which is a dark, moist place, and you perspire during the day, and then you take it out and you recharge it or you put batteries in, but the moisture stays within the receiver or the microphone unless it's removed or has a chance to dry up its own accord. So that's Redux, and they're a corporate partner of the Hearing Matters podcast. But you and I have known each other a long time. So what got you into Redux? Because it seems that, again, your skill set and your life's experience work very, very well with the goals and objectives of the company.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

You get many itches. And when the pandemic hit, I realized I wanted know, I wanted to be able to do more with my skill set and I wanted a bit more of a variety of what I could do. And I happened to meet my current boss, james Schrake, at a conference and we just really hit it off and just really stay connected into the industry and just kept in touch. And there was an opportunity I wrote that read off where I could become director of sales and marketing. And the thing was is that I really got to experience the power of read up to my own sister.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

She has MS and multiple sclerosis and sometimes when her lesions are on the spine, it can affect her hearing, sure, but shows the where's hearing is with receiver in the ear and when they have moisture it can also affect her hearing, of course.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

And so I got a read-up for her to try. And you know the beauty of the read-up we can remove all moisture in six to eight minutes with the professional unit. And when she put them in her eyes wide, it was like she didn't have the same thing. She turned to um her then husband, mike, and said wow, mike, like I haven't heard this clearly in so long. And that just goes to show, like, what moisture can do, just like the little bit of moisture being added every day just slowly takes away the time to be able to hear well and you don't even realize what you're missing. And so that's where I realized, rita, you know, know, just as important as you know, seeing an audiologist or hearing care professional to get a quality hearing test to be fit with the best technology that you can to have the best access. It's also important to maintain these devices so that you can hear your best.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

You know that's so good that you said that, because people want a one and done. They want to just get something, you know, a pill, preferably right, there are no pills for sensory neural hearing loss. And then you know you wear hearing aids and you think, okay, I'm done. No, you're not. It's like having an automobile, it's like having a house, it's like having dinner. Things require maintenance. And the very best hearing aids on the market, you know they're going to last seven years, maybe five years, but that's if you maintain them properly. If you don't maintain them properly, they may actually go to the extended warranty period two to three years, and then you know you'll be shopping for new ones. And it's not just that you can't take out the moisture at that point, but the moisture sitting inside the hearing aid for a long time tends to degrade the other components. So it's very much worthwhile to maintain them properly and to remove the moisture. So, mark, what's new for you in 2025, 2026? What are you looking forward to?

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Yes, so we are definitely in the works of a few new products, actually, but one of the things that we've heard in the industry is that people want to be able to charge and dry their hearing aids at the same time, and so we are working on that solution, and that will be something that's exciting to launch, so we will be able to remove all moisture while also charging and drying hearing aids at the very same time, which is going to be very exciting.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

So you'd have to have a few different models, right, because some of the manufacturers use X, some use Y, some use Z, so you'll have to be able to accommodate the different rechargeable battery configurations.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Exactly. So, again, we still have the Pro line, and so this is the new version for the consumer line. So we still have the Redux Home and that one. Anybody with any hearing ear pods, whatnot, can use that. It just doesn't have any power to power the charger so that you can drive and charge at the same time, and we never want that to be an impeding factor. So we are going to come out with a new dryer that allows for that benefit, which is going to be really exciting. That's great.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

I do use my Redux home unit for my AirPods and I find that really useful because you know I'll be out doing lawn work or something gardening or building something outside and I live in southern Texas so it's rather warm and you know I slowly hear the quality of my AirPods going away and then I'll come in, I'll put them in the dryer and I'll wear them later that day and they sound great again. And so it's not just for hearing aids, it's almost for any unit that you're going to stick in your ear or it, and it doesn't have to be ear related, it could be any small device that tends to build up moisture. So, mark, I want to thank you for your time.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

This has been so much fun and I really I think you've had an amazing journey and I'm glad you got to tell your story. I think it's fascinating and I'm very proud of you. And I want to say I know how hard it's been. I don't I have presbycusis. I don't have, you know, a hearing loss from very, very young and I didn't go through that in my education and I didn't get a cochlear implant, let alone the second one, and I didn't have to deal with people running me off the road and saying hey look out, what are you deaf or something you know.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

So you went through all that and yet you still smile and you're still a compassionate human being and you know there's so much life and love in you and I'm so happy to know you and I'm proud of you.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Well, doug, I mean it's because of people like you in the community that have supported me that really inspired me to be an audiologist, because I've gotten so much support from the community to be able to help me be where I am today. I would never have been able to do surgical support in the OR for Cochlear for as many years as I did without having the wonderful people behind me and the technology. So it really is a village and thank you, I really appreciate that. And it's been great village and thank you, I really appreciate that, and it's been great being your friend and knowing you as well, doug, I'll look forward to seeing you soon.

Dr. Douglas L. Beck:

Thanks so much, Mark.

Dr. Mark Campbell-Foster:

Well, take care. Bye now, Okay.

People on this episode

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Blaise M. Delfino, M.S. - HIS

Host
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Dr. Douglas Beck

Co-host