In Jan/Feb 2020, I chose to set my ‘T’ levels (the minimal amount of electrical stimulation required for the auditory system to perceive sound) too high for my brain to tolerate, but my audiologist and I hoped that with time it would settle down and I would benefit from hearing lower pitches as a result. I had an appointment to return in April 2020, which was obviously cancelled due to the pandemic and I waited until August 2021 before requesting an appointment and I was seen in September 2021. I remember that these settings meant I could hear more background noise around me and understandably, my speech perception skills slowly dropped off. Back then I was working in a pre-school; sounds like children crying or yelling were absorbed into the ether & I was unable to quickly respond to a child in distress or two kids that had taken a dislike to each other! I was mistaking my husband coughing for my name (“cough cough” = “Sarah” somehow!) and in the ASSEs (Auditory speech sounds evaluation) for a few years, I had been unable to hear the difference between ‘i-a' and ‘y-I’ at 4K and ‘eh-a’ and ‘er-a’ at 1k, which again affected my speech perception. In addition to this, and perhaps the worst thing for me, was the fact that when all around me appeared to be quiet, I later learnt that my processor was picking up environmental sounds around the 15db at 1K and I was hearing this as a ‘sink filling up with water/water trickling’ sound. It almost verged on a buzzing noise too. It wasn’t very relaxing and meant I didn’t look forward to quiet and I just preferred to remove it, which was a crying shame!

So... In September 2021, I saw a lovely audiologist, Gemma, (who I hadn’t seen before) and she sympathised with my frustrations that my hearing hadn’t been as good as it was in 2017/2018. Straight away, she set about testing my hearing levels, using the normal ‘bleep’ test, she tested my BKB sentences & did the ASSE test. She also tested my impedance & although one electrode was a little high, she said we would monitor it and it wouldn’t affect my hearing. She also adapted one of the tests to get me to count the beeps, rather than use the bleeper (hand switch) because my tinnitus kicked in during the tests. This enabled her to see what I was *actually* hearing and what was a manifestation of noise in my brain (tinnitus). Unbeknownst to me, whilst doing all these tests, Gemma was switching between the program I’d walked in with and a new one that she was tweaking as she tested. When she finished testing, she put the new program on. Immediately, her voice was clearer, I could hear more consonants and amazingly, the ‘trickling’ noise had gone! Gemma quickly switched back to the previous programme for me to compare and her voice sounded like she’d gone underwater… With the tweaks she’d made, I finally scored 100% on the ASSE test – a feat I hadn’t been able to do for a few years! Here are the results of the BKB tests:

Female voice, in quiet, CI only:

Old settings 64% - New 86%

Speech in Noise, female voice, CI only

old settings 20% - new 46%

My audiogram is below with my pre CI hearing levels shown by the pink dotted line at the bottom – a ‘severe/profound’ hearing loss and the black dots at the top – what I can now hear.

It is so important to highlight here, that a CI is not a cure for deafness. These black beautiful dots below do not translate to “normal hearing” in real life, into noisy, busy, multifaceted environments. For me, these dots translate into being able to hear speech when previously, I couldn’t hear consonants or hear without lip-reading. These dots translate into hearing my son yell “Mummy” 50,000 times a day, when previously I might have heard “Mumm*”. I can hear the difference between him reading aloud a ‘b’ or a ‘d’; for god’s sake the word is ‘dog’, not ‘bog’!

My take home point from this recent programming is, find a good audiologist and never let them out of your sight!! Unfortunately, we can’t stalk our NHS staff and so my advice is: write down every single sound you feel you’re muddling up. The more specific you can be, the more your audiologist can target an electrode/pitch array and tweak it to improve your hearing ability. And when you do hearing tests/speech tests, be honest – tell them exactly what you are hearing as then they can apply that knowledge to their programming.