Deaf at age six, Blatchford was educated with speech lessons, speech reading, and hearing aids. At the age of 62 she underwent a cochlear implantation. In this memoir she describes living with a cochlear implant, including her realization that amplification and comprehension are not the same. Gradually the soup of sound she heard at first gave way to a selective hearing of sentences. When asked by other deaf people if they should receive an implant, she cautions that it is an individual decision.