Much, MUCH better.

I have truly turned the corner in my recovery from surgery. I felt nearly normal all day yesterday, and even went for an easy swim with Michelle after work. Tonight I’m planning to climb at the gym, and I’m looking forward to a camping and climbing trip, and hopefully a day of triathlon training, over the upcoming holiday weekend. I am pretty sure that by next Wednesday, when the implant is activated, I will be done with the healing process and can focus on the hearing process.

I keep forgetting to mention that having only one working ear hasn’t been as difficult as I feared. It does make me a little nervous when I’m walking around alone, and it makes it hard for me to regulate my voice on the phone, when I have my hearing aid turned to the telecoil function and can’t hear anything outside the phone, but I’m not having much trouble hearing people in normal conversational settings. The biggest problem, and one I hadn’t anticipated, is that any loud-ish background noise completely overwhelms all other sound.

For example, if I’m in a loud restaurant, or outside in a high-traffic area, all I can hear is the conversational buzz or the roar of passing cars. Given that nothing is different about my left-ear hearing aid, and that I previously heard almost nothing in my right ear, this is a strange and interesting discovery. I guess that when I had two functioning ears, I was able to absorb a fair amount of background noise in my right ear, which couldn’t understand speech anyway, freeing my left to do more of the auditory heavy lifting. With the right ear out of commission, the left ear has to hear EVERYTHING, and it isn’t capable of filtering out much of the background noise on its own. This is fascinating, and it has me very curious to see (or, well, hear) how this phenomenon is affected by the initial activation.

Comments

[cmeslin]

Glad to hear that you've turned the corner. Best of luck with the training this weekend!

[Jennifer]

I'm so glad you're feeling better! I hope things just keep getting better and better for you!!
When's your activation date? Do you know yet?