What's that sound?

I'm at one week post activation and each day is bringing better understanding of what I am hearing.  Having said that, I have a long way to go.

A couple of the first things I noticed shortly after I was activated was how much clearer sounds, like running water for example, were than speech.  Wow, my microwave buttons were loud! I had no idea. One day I heard a sound like someone was popping bubble wrap.  I looked around to identify the source and noticed I had just received a text.  Aha!  That sound was my text alert.  I wanted to hear more of it!  

Speech is still not at a place even close to where it was with my hearing aids, but I didn't expect it to be this soon.  At first my brain seemed to have a lag time between when someone said something and the time I realized what they said.  This isn't a problem anymore. Now I can communicate in real time, even if I am not understanding more than half of what is said.

The last couple of days I've noticed a marked improvement in  understanding voices, but things are still a jumbled mess of garbled sound.  It reminds me of what it sounds like when a radio station isn't quite in tune -- I can tell someone's talking but I'm getting a bunch of frequency and static noise.  I've decided my word for the day is reverberation because that sums up what I'm experiencing the most.

On my way to the grocery store today I listened to the Diane Riehm show on NPR because I knew it would be good practice for listening to speech.  I could hear one lady's voice (I don't know who it was, but it wasn't Diane Riehm) pretty clearly and was able to pick up a significant amount of what she said.  I came to the realization that I was hearing two layers of voices at the same time -- the person's
"normal-sounding" voice and the robotic version of their voice.  If I focused on their "normal-sounding" voice I was able to comprehend what she was saying much easier.  I have no idea if this is a typical experience, but it was quite cool yet annoying at the same time.  

I could write a lot more about specific things I heard this past week, but I will save it for another post.