The day before my 3rd mapping

I'm off to the hospital tomorrow for my third mapping. I wanted to update this before I go so that I have a before and after memoir! I have had some real ups and downs in the past week and a bit. The first few days after switch on were a nightmare. All I could hear was what sounded like birds in my ear all day. "Shh", "ch" and "ss" were the only clear sounds. By Wednesday I was very emotional, hating the implant and all I wanted to do was rip it off and hurl it at the nearest wall! I cried a lot that day and lots of my colleagues witnessed this, but I couldn't pretend I was happy when I clearly wasn't. Because of this state that I got in I really wanted to go back to the Emmeline Centre and change the settings. From talking to others and what I felt personally, I decided that I'd set my comfortably loud sounds too loud and wanted to get them turned down. I also wanted emotional reassurance from professionals that things were going to get better! So I went back to the hospital on Friday and I spent a good hour or so with the Physicist adjusting all the levels and he tried to give me more lower sounds as I could not hear these as yet. I went away from that appointment feeling much happier and the sounds I was hearing didn't give me such a headache. I still reluctantly wore it but over the weekend something happened to my attitude. At a concert on Sunday I fully expected to remove the processor and enjoy the music with just one hearing aid. However, I took it off and felt unbalanced without it! OMG... So I put it back on and wore it for the whole evening, beeps and all! I have continued to wear it with my hearing aid all week and just wearing the processor in the mornings and evenings at home or any other opportunity when it's quiet and I can focus on noises around me. I can hear my very loud kitchen clock ticking from two metres away and couldn't do this with just my hearing aids. I can hear my car indicator ticking and couldn't do this before.

My colleague tested what I could hear using six sounds that are used to test childrens hearing with their implants; ooh, arr, eee, mmm, sss and shh. If there were two sounds to choose from I could discriminate which sound she'd said. If I was choosing one from all six I didn't do as well. I tended to confuse ooh with mmm and sss with eee as these latter sounds are quite high. I was very pleased with these results though and felt good that just over a week after being switched on I'm able to discriminate between these sounds and it can only improve. I might have been able to distinguish these sounds with my two hearing aids but I certainly would have struggled with the higher sounds and these are the sounds I'm now having success hearing again.

Some things are no longer sounding beepy - I scratched a rough velcro strip on Wed after switch on to see what it sounded like and instead of sounding scratchy it sounded like "beep,beep,beep" in very quick succession. Now, things are starting to make sense, paper and plastic are still weird but getting there. Speech is very boring to listen to as the higher frequencies are clearish but the rest is low and monotonous, like a very boring maths teacher droning on at the same frequency. So, if I sing along to music with just my implant I start singing with a low, boring voice and I switch my hearing aid on and realise the music is soaring and my voice should be too! I must be getting used to these higher sounds though as the lower ones are starting to come through. I'm looking forward to tomorrow and seeing how much it changes afterwards!