You know how at the baseball game, each player has his own special theme music, which is played over the loudspeakers when he comes up in the batting order? After yesterday’s appointment, mine is Really Bad Techno. Which nevertheless marks significant progress.
On the way to my appointment yesterday, I turned off my hearing aid and concentrated on having a conversation with my mom using only the CI. I could tell that I was actually hearing some words, and was definitely hearing the inflections of each word and the spaces between them, although I couldn’t really understand what my mom was saying without looking at her or having some context.
As with my previous mapping sessions, we began the appointment by talking about what I was hearing and how I was hearing it, and then running through beep sequences to test my ability to tolerate volume and my need for adjustments at particular frequencies. The audiologist then gave me four new programs. These programs are much, much louder than the loudest program I had before. They also have the added "sensitivity" feature, which allows me to adjust how far away from me the CI picks up sound. Some of the programs require me to do this manually, with the touch of a button, and others have an automatic sensitivity adjustment (which I can manually override). I haven’t played around with this feature too much yet, but I intend to do so at the climbing gym (and, afterward, at the bar), where the background noise can be overwhelming.
While I am hearing a great deal more now, it still sounds awful. The background beeps and whistles continue to fade into the background, but my brain isn’t totally ignoring them. This seems to be particularly persistent with computer noises. Every single stroke on the keyboard or movement of the mouse results in a loud, annoying, beep-beep-beep-whistle-whistle. Given that I spend almost my entire day banging away at the keyboard, this is incredibly annoying.
Still, more and more, I’m hearing words and "important" sounds. I could hear, though not understand, the elevator announcing my floor this morning. I could hear, distinguish, and sometimes understand, almost every sentence Steve tested me with last night, in a controlled exercise. And I can hear myself speaking in words now, not just beeps and whistles.
While I’m in the office, I have NPR streaming in the background. Last week, I could hear the rises and falls of the radio voices, and could often tell when the program shifted from talking to a musical interlude. Today, I can pick out a great many words and phrases: strategy, management, government, Iraq, understood, larger amounts, city, dollars, plight, agency, emergency, just a few days before, on the streets, in the capital city, what was important, see something, in a Cabinet meeting, serious concerns, from beginning to end . . . the list goes on. I can’t really tell what the reporters are talking about, but it’s pretty exciting when I realize that I’m hearing Actual Words, however electronic they may sound.
When I have both the CI and my hearing aid on, I can hear myself and others both "normally" and electronically. This is very, very strange and distracting. It’s as though I’m hearing speech almost-simultaneously in two distinct places - both at its source (for example, in the vicinity of the speaker’s mouth), and directly on the right side of my head, where the CI is. The former sounds like I’m used to it sounding, and the latter sounds like the robotic voice from an early 80s teen-computer-hacker flick. Plus, there’s a bit of a whistling "tail" on many final-word-sounds, particularly esses. The net result, factoring in the omnipresent background beeps and whistles, is Bad Techno.
There are a few scattered moments when things seem to sound the way I want and expect them to. These moments go a long way towards relieving my frustration and fear, and convincing me that sooner, rather than later, I’ll be hearing more and better than I ever have before, even if it mostly sucks right now. Over the next two weeks, until my next mapping session on June 29, I’ll be focusing on integrating the hearing-aid sound and the CI sound, and hearing the latter as something less electronic and roboto-genous. Hopefully, soon, it will be less Bad Techno and more Good Bluegrass.
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