It's been a crazily busy week since I've had my Cochlear Implant speech processor activated - I haven't had time to sit down and post some more entries to the blog, so I thought while the Thanksgiving meal is taking care of itself cooking, I'd take a few minutes to gather my thoughts and reflect on how things have gone.
Of course, the first thing is that I'm thankful to have had the CI, and for it to be active. I know that if I lived in other places in the world or didn't have good health insurance in the USA, a CI would have been unavailable to me, and I'm thankful for that. I'm thankful that I can hear, and even start to make sense of, my family's voices again. It's hard to do an actual comparison, but I think that I'm getting close to the level of understanding I had with the hearing aid before having the CI, at least for in-person conversations. The phone is still beyond me, but the captioning is working as good as it was before.
In terms of experiences - I know it's trite, and many CI recipients have already said the same thing - but this is a noisy world we live in. I have the volume and sensitivity levels turned WAY down on my CI, and it's still sometimes overwhelming. I know that will improve over time as my brain learns what to do with all of this new stimulation. I have my second mapping appointment with the AuD coming up next week (would have been this week except for the Thanksgiving holiday), so I think that will probably make a difference once we adjust the programming a bit.
A few days ago, I entered a phase where everyone's voices sound like they are talking with their cheeks full of food and with a lisp. "S" sounds like "sh" or "ch." It's unpleasant, but not overwhelmingly so. I have to stop myself from telling my family to "not talk like that" because it's my brain doing that, not their voices. I suspect that the mapping appointment will also help with that. I've been keeping notes of things that I notice so that I can mention them to Dr. G at the mapping appointment, but right now, the S/SH confusion is the only major issue.
Another thing I've learned (and should have known already, based on my reading) - CI recipients need to remember to carry all of their "stuff" with them when they travel. I was in the hospital lodging facility the other day to see baby Chloe, and when I left early in the morning to travel back home for some work meetings, I forgot the remote assistant (meaning I cannot adjust the sensitivity, only the volume), the phone clip (no bluetooth streaming from the laptop, so rehab exercises are tough), and the second rechargeable battery AND the holder for the disposable batteries (meaning I need to be sure to charge the battery overnight). Now I see why Cochlear gives you a big bag (like an old laptop carrying bag) and a few smaller cases to cart this stuff around.
I'm pretty much at the stage where the speech processor is turned on all the time. Sometimes at dinner, with all of the hubbub, I need to take it off for a few minutes and relax, but I've made big strides since that first day when I couldn't stand to have it on more than about an hour at once. I'm finding that I need to force myself to turn the volume on the TV instead of just leaving it at zero and using the captions - and I'm enjoying it more. Most of the voices don't sound completely as I remember them yet, and the S/SH confusion is irritating, but listening to the TV as opposed to just watching it is really helping a lot.
For those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, I wish you a happy one. For all of my readers, may you have many things in your life for which you are thankful.