It was bound to happen. Cochlear implants from the main manufacturers are too expnesive for many in foreign countries. Now India's scientists have come up with an inexpensive cochlear implant of their own, which will have clinical trials soon. How inexpensive? The Indian news media reports that the expected cost is as little as 1 lakh, compared to 7 to 10 lakh for the ones from the main manufacturers.

In India,  a lakh is 100,000 rupees. An international currency converter (http://www.xe.com/) shows 100,000 rupees equal to $2,021.22 as of today. That means an implant today costs as much as $20,000 in India.

Who knows? Not too far in the future, we could see Americans and others heading to India to get cochlear implants. Not everyone has insurance that will cover the cost of a cochlear implant.

That's the point of this article in BBC News. The BBC reports on young deaf people who have both chosen and not chosen to, get cochlear implants.  Cochlear implants are just a choice to make. We all know that people with cochlear implants can choose to be culturally deaf just as some hard of hearing people identify with the deaf community.

The San Francisco Chronicle carried a report over the weekend about how a federal magistrate ruled that the captioning lawsuit in California against CNN can continue. The lawsuit is actually about the lack of captions on CNN.com. In a rather interesting statement, the lawyer for CNN states that closed captioning would "violate its editorial practices." That must mean that it is CNN.com policy to not be accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people.

Sometimes teenage boys can be sweet when you least expect it. That certainly is the case in the experience of "Winter" on the forum. Winter is a deaf teenage girl living in a small rural town. She expresses her frustration that many hearing boys she tried to date, would leave because they could not deal with her deafness. Now she is seeing a hearing teenage boy who is really trying - the boy loaded up with sign language books. This one sounds like a keeper, at least until Winter goes to college.

My own teenage years are far behind me, but I can identify with Winter's frustrations. Do you identify with Winter's frustrations? Share your own past frustrations with trying to date hearing teenagers, on the forum.