A VERY FAST YEAR

05. May 2017 · 1 comment · Categories: A Personal Journal · Tags: , ,

May 6 will be the one year anniversary of my cochlear implant surgery. It seems like it was just last week, but isn’t that always the case?

I have never experienced anything as life changing as this. (Well getting married the first time would qualify, but you know what I mean.) It’s not just learning how to manage the device but also the trips to the hospital in Boston for programing and learning. It has truly been an adventure.

Progress was slow in coming. I started off understanding some speech but there was little improvement for several months. Then things started to happen as I noticed sounds I was not used to hearing and we were able to “clean” up the device’s performance – searching for a purer sound.

Carol Ann, my partner in life, has a voice that has been surprisingly difficult to understand, even with the implant. After my last adjustment or mapping, things took a leap forward and we can now have meaningful conversations in most environments. Some restaurants and driving together are no longer situations non-gratis. We are thrilled about this.

Group conversations can still be a challenge and many public places are still out of bounds. The telephone is still troubling – depending on the voice on the other end. Even TV is better, but BlueTooth helps with the addition of the RemoteMic and an audio looped room for the T-Coil.

There are remaining tweaks and dedicated programs to be tried out but all in all this is a happy anniversary. There might even be a cookie somewhere.

Thanks to all my friends for your encouragement and understanding. Thanks to my friends on the Hearing Journey Forum who graciously listened to my whining and complaining and whose advise, encouragement and judgement have been invaluable.

I believe there is a new year ahead. I’ll hear you there.

AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

05. July 2016 · 3 comments · Categories: A Personal Journal · Tags: , , ,

Sometimes the most obvious things are the most hidden. When I was first confronted with my hearing loss, a friend said to me, “Jerry, you do an excellent job of lip reading”. I had never even thought about lip reading and surely I did not think I was doing it. That was nineteen years ago.

Practicing with my new cochlear implant has revealed my secret life as a proficient lip reader, after all these years. What that means is I don’t understand diddly without looking at the lips of the speaker. Carol Ann and I can have a CI only conversation for an hour and when she hides here face it’s as though she had suddenly switched into ancient Navaho. It’s distressing.

My friend John on Hearing Journey – an online forum run by Advanced Bionics, the maker of my device – has just received his second implant. He talks about working with sounds that do not remotely resemble speech – yet. He gently reminds me that working outside my comfort zone is the only pathway to making sense of ancient Navaho – so to speak. This is hard. Much harder than I imagined.

Having a forum, a relationship with people on the same journey as I am, is proving to be a wonderful and meaningful resource. These people are scattered across the continent. It’s unlikely we would ever meet. I do have a friend – a fellow Mainer – who had her operation on the same ear, on the same day in the same town but different hospitals. Her husband was a nurse and my partner in life CA was a nurse as well. With all those share points we decided that we should meet on one of their trips down to Boston. We are having similar experiences in our initial learning phase. We encourage each other and take nourishment from the knowledge that we are in good company, and are not alone.