Thursday 20 September 2012

9 days to go till the 4th anniversary of my AB CI activation

I had my annual programming yesterday and usually, programmings/mappings are very uneventful and I'm in and out of the soundproof room within the hour.. Not yesterday! Yesterday, I had a new program added to my choice and this program had the High Res Fidelity 120 technology added to it. Why didn't I have this already? I hear you ask.. Well, four years ago, my brain and my auditory nerve couldn't handle the over-stimulation and richness of sound and I complained that it was too loud! In the meantime, no audiologist had thought of trying it again... But yesterday I had a lovely audiologist who wanted to try something new and see what I thought of it.

 Initially, she had to turn the volume down and I was instantly transported back to four years ago, when everything sounded robotic and very strange and I felt emotional again. However, within minutes, the 'roboticness' had faded and although things were much quieter than I was used to, I wanted to give my new program a go. My audiologist said that it's usual for the auditory nerve in people with long term deafness to fatigue quickly and my brain would have to re-learn sounds again with the new program. Great(!) I thought, another four years of getting to a good level of hearing again??

Yesterday's hearing test (before trying the new program) showed new hearing levels of 25dB across most of the range of frequencies!! This is so much better than I ever could have hoped for, but obviously those results do not translate into coping with real life situations; accents, background noise and unfamiliar sounds. However, after a day on my new program, I'm finding that things are changing; I can hear speech on the TV at the same time as my own voice or another voice in the room which is a complete contrast to before, usually the loudest voice would dominate what I could hear.  This is exciting, but needs to be explored more!

I wonder what else I will discover with time....??

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