Deciding which bionic ear I wanted

4th July 2008: I had another appointment at the Emmeline Centre to choose which device I would like to have implanted. I had already decided that I liked Advanced Bionics because colleagues had influenced me. The fact that you can change the colour of the BTE and headcap was also a little bit of an influence! The appointment started with someone explaining to me (again! Because I still haven’t learn it..) how a cochlear implant works and then she pushed the three different devices in front of me and attempted to explain the different features that they have. I tried them all on and found that Med-el didn’t sit on my ear very well and I didn’t like the fact that it has a remote control to operate it. What if I temporarily mislaid the remote control (I hardly ever lose things) and couldn’t change the settings or even turn it on?! So I took this one off my list and tried the Cochlear Nucleus one on next. My mother has this brand (has done for 9 years and likes it, is very happy with it) so I wanted to consider it. However, I found it too bulky at the bottom of the BTE, it’s narrow at the top and gets wider as it gets longer so I took this one off the list too! This obviously left me with Advanced Bionics Harmony High Res 120. I tried this one on and it felt very comfortable even if the microphone coming down the front of the ear felt a bit odd. It was also very odd to picture myself with the headcap/magnet at the back of my head. This was the realisation moment for me… I thought “this is what it’s going to look like” and strangely it wasn’t too much of a shock and I felt, for the first time, a little bit of excitement since this whole process began! My only dilemma now was what colour I should have the BTE in. It comes in beige (which is darker than a hearing aid beige, more a light brown), black and silver. I wanted the beige as this is the colour I’ve always had in my hearing aids and it would better match my hair colour. My boyfriend wanted me to have black as he said “I should be proud of it, show it off and black is cooler than BEIGE!”. After much dithering and changing my mind over the next week or so I finally settled on silver. This colour combines everything my boyfriend says but isn’t as obvious as the black or as ugly as the beige. I’ve chosen accent caps that are patterned and can have a rainbow headcap if I want! (I love rainbows, me.)