I have little to report. For nearly a week, I've been wearing the CI at the top of the volume range in my loudest program. Reaching that level by my next appointment was the primary goal my audiologist gave me. That appointment is June 13, so I suppose this counts as overachieving. I'm also cruising through the low-level exercises, most of which simply have me recognizing syllables and word breaks.
I've been trying to keep my hearing aid off while I'm working, and I can usually hear when someone knocks on my office door or when the phone rings. I haven't had much time to watch TV this week, but when I have turned on the television, I've been turning off my hearing aid, and trying to connect the sounds i'm hearing to the words in the closed captions. I think I'm soooort of starting to hear some more distinct sounds, but they still mostly sound like collections of beeps and whistles.
Last night, we did an exercise in which Steve read a paragraph out loud to me while I followed along on a piece of paper. My job was to point to each word as he said it. That was a piece of cake, and I thought I might be actually hearing some of the words themselves, rather than just their syllables and inflections. After we finished two such paragraphs, I asked Steve to randomly say some of the words from the paragraph, out of order and context. This was a more interesting - and challenging - task. I correctly identified about 80 % of the words, mostly on the first try.
Most of the once-overwhelming background noises, such as the swamp cooler just outside my home office door, are no longer drowning out all other sounds with their persistent whistles. And yet, I'm still hearing some sort of whistling or beeping almost constantly, and I still (STILL!) have unrelenting tinnitus when the implant is off. It's driving me nuts. At Wednesday night's climbing session, it took me several routes on toprope before I could get into enough of a rhythm to ignore the whistling and ringing and focus my mind enough to lead. On Thursday, the tinnitus had me on the verge of tears as I struggled to get my breathing under control and to settle my stroke during my first real open-water swim of the season (somehow always a bit of a panic-inducing moment for me, even after ten years of tri-training). On the other hand, the ear-noise is only mildly distracting when I'm cycling or running. I need this to settle down soon, because it's crazy-making.
I still have to turn the implant off to hear well (with my other ear) when I'm talking on the phone. Crowded situations are nearly impossible, since the CI simply floods my head with whistles and beeps, and my hearing aid can't sort out the crowd noise from the stuff I actually want to hear.
And yet, it hasn't even been two weeks yet since the implant was activated, and I have made considerable progress. I hope that on Tuesday morning, I'll get another big bump in the volume range, and perhaps some tweaking of the map to help me start hearing things more normally.
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