Ron Dillon - learning a new way of hearing

Ron Dillon has a pragmatic view of life. Were he to participate in a “Finding Your Strengths” study, he would probably find that adaptability was one of his top traits.

Ron Dillon

He is in the field of mergers and acquisitions, meaning he helps people buy and sell businesses. He started his own company with his son, Rick, in 1990, after trying to buy the company Rick worked for. When that merger and acquisition company wouldn’t sell, Ron said, they decided to create their own, and the Dillon Group was born.

Entering into such negotiations means that being able to hear is crucial. Ron has dealt with hearing loss since his 30s, and has been through eight or 10 pairs of hearing aids through the years. When he learned about cochlear implants, he wondered if such an implant would help him. “If I didn’t get some help, I would have to retire,” Ron said. And at age 78, he wasn’t ready to consider retirement. So, the man who was born on the same day Franklin Roosevelt took office paid a visit to a doctor at the University of Kansas Medical Center. “I went in for a test just to see if it would help me hear,” he said.

His hearing loss was in part because of genetics on his father’s side. Environmental noise might also have been a cause, Ron said, because he spent a lot of hours on a tractor when he was younger. He was also exposed to some degree of loud noise while serving in the Army Corps of Engineers in a supply depot in Pusan at the end of the Korean War. How he lost his hearing is somewhat immaterial at this point. But being able to hear conversation is significant.

A cochlear implant is an option for people who are profoundly deaf or severely hard-of-hearing, and in the past was only offered for those who had lost more than 95 percent of their hearing. The implant consists of an external portion that sits behind the ear, and a second portion that is surgically implanted under the skin. Rather than amplify sounds like a hearing aid, a cochlear device bypasses damaged portions of the ear to directly stimulate the auditory nerve. In essence, it requires learning a whole new way of hearing, of processing sounds.

Ron had the implant about 18 months ago, and is more than halfway through the typical three-year adjustment period of learning how to hear with the device. It’s a trial and error situation, with adjustments based in large part on what the person with the implant tells the technician through the testing. But it’s impossible to tell if the adjustment helps or hinders until you get back out in the world and try conversing with people in different situations. With Ron, the latest adjustment didn’t help. “I sat around a table the other night, there were four of us, and I couldn’t understand one thing they were saying,” Ron said. “There was too much of an echo with the implant.”

So Ron will visit the doctor again to enhance the latest adjustment and try for a different outcome. But he feels like he’s getting closer to where he wants to be, and has no regrets about going this route. “With hearing aids,” he said, “I would get less than 50 percent word recognition. I get in the high 80s with the cochlear.”

Ron is mostly patient during this long process. Perhaps he’s learned that art through life circumstances. He and his first wife, Sharon, had four children by birth. When their oldest child was 13, they found themselves taking in a 17-year-old boy, at the request of a family friend, who desperately needed care and love. Ron said that boy blended quite easily into their family. Then came two and three-year-old siblings, a boy and girl, who lived off and on with the Dillons over the next 20 or so years, returning to them each time things fell apart with their birth parents. Ron still keeps in contact with the siblings, though Sharon died 25 years ago from cancer. In fact, just recently Ron tried to impart some words of wisdom to his adopted daughter, when she wrote to tell him that she and her spouse were fighting constantly, mostly about money. Ron’s advice: “Next time that comes up sit down together and review your checkbook. If you find that your fighting has increased the funds in your account then by all means keep on fighting, but if it has not then you have proven that fighting did not help so stop it, put your arms around each other and pray or dance or do something to release the tension.”

After Sharon’s death, Ron didn’t remain a widower for long. Upon the advice of a friend who was entering his fifth marriage, Ron placed an ad in the “singles” section of a newspaper. But he did so in jest, stating he was a wino living in a cardboard box looking for the right person. “I just wanted to see who would answer,” Ron said. Apparently, a certain woman named Marjorie picked up on that sense of humor and responded. Ron said they knew in about three weeks that they were going to marry. They celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary in May.

Ron’s oldest son, the 17-year-old he and Sharon took in, passed away several years ago from cancer. He has also lost his youngest brother, two brothers-in-law and a sister-in-law all to cancer. But such is life. “You accept the challenges as they come along,” Ron said, which is also his attitude about his hearing loss. “And when I look back, I’ve had so many blessings.”