Aural Therapy

A man was telling his neighbor, "I just bought a new hearing aid. It cost me $4,000, but it's state of the art. All my hearing problems are over."
"That's great," answered the neighbor. "What kind is it?"
"Twelve-thirty."

When I got my CI activated, I was told to do therapy every day to help my brain understand what I am hearing. I haven't been as diligent in doing my daily therapy, but now that the holidays are behind me, I have more time to devote to it. Therapy comes in multiple forms, but I'll highlight a couple of things I've been trying.

My audiologist at Elk's Hearing & Balance recommends listening to a book on CD, especially if you can get the book also and follow along. I am fortunate to have found a book on CD for a book I already own. The lady doing the audio does a great job with voice inflections for the different characters. One day I began my therapy and thought, "wow, I'm really hearing well today", but then I realized my hearing aid was in my right ear. Now that I know what the lady's voice really sounds like, I realize my CI is a little off from the natural sound. What seems more adult through my aided ear is a little more younger-sounding through my bionic ear. Someday I will listen with my hearing aid again and see if I'm still detecting a big gap between the two devices.

I use an app called iAngelSound (it's free) as another source for my therapy. It allows you to set up a session of tested words and then in a multiple-choice format, you pick what word you think is being spoken. You can set the session up in a number of different ways, such as how many words to test in a session, the number of word choices to choose from, and whether to allow for repeats if you guess the incorrect word, among many others.  

I found this app to be almost too easy because many times I can understand just enough to figure out what word it must be out of the four words to choose from. The app lets you repeat the spoken word if necessary. This is a great feature because it allows you to really focus on the phonics that might be difficult to understand. For instance, I have certain phonics that are easier for me to discriminate than others. The 'ch' sound is easier for me to detect than 'th'. Sometimes the 'th' sound is more like an 'f' to me. The word 'rude' sounds like 'rid', but none of the other choices come close so by manner of elimination I can figure out that it is 'rude' and get it right. Here's another example: the word spoken is 'girth', but to my ear (brain) it sounds like 'birth'. The other words to choose from are 'wedge', 'shed' and 'pawed', which to me don't even come close to what I am hearing. My brain can hear the '-irth' pretty clearly so by the process of elimination I can guess 'girth' correctly.  When I test myself over and over and get 96% to 100% accuracy, I take that result with a grain of salt. It's not a very accurate reflection of how well I am able to do in real-life situations. But, there are still a lot more features I have yet to try so I will continue to use this app as part of my ongoing therapy.

I will touch on additional therapies in future posts. In the meantime, I need to get back to my iAngelSound app since the last word I got wrong was my husband's name - Tom. I am convinced the man is saying 'tomb'.