Many factors determine how I might hear in any given day. Some of these are controllable and some are not. If I don't feel well, am tired or am stressed, my brain has a harder time comprehending what it is hearing and processing. If I'm in an environment with bad acoustics, distracting noise or the speaker mumbles or doesn't face me when talking, then I have to work extra hard to understand. None of these situations are new to a CI wearer. These are simply the facts of life for anyone with a hearing loss.
I have to admit I have been a little frustrated with how I've been progressing since my last mapping. Or maybe I'm just distracted or need to lower my expectations. This past week I started working on a new therapy on a website called Angel Sounds. (On a side note...this can be used for anyone who wants to learn how to hear better, whether they wear a CI, hearing aid, or neither). I've used their app on the iPad, but I decided to see if they had any different features on their website and the answer is yes, they do!
After scoring pretty high for simple word recognition using the quiet listening conditions, I was quickly thrown off when I began testing myself on the pure tone discrimination. The software gives you three buttons that play a tone in which two are the same and one is different. You have to click on the button you think is different. Sounds simple enough, but I keep getting hung up on tones I would describe as in the middle frequencies and very close to each other. I really struggle to hear the difference between D3 and C3 and I've been stuck on the 4th level in this module. I got so frustrated that today I decided to work on another module.
Today I tested on fruits, with four pictures to choose from after listening to someone say the name of the fruit. I scored 100% each time, but this was using the easiest setting, the quiet listening condition. When I changed that to the cafe setting my scores dropped to 84% and that's after hitting the repeat button numerous times. Apparently there isn't a limit in how many times you can hit the repeat button. After I tested myself on fruits, I moved on to animals and common numbers, using first the quiet setting and then switching to the cafe setting. In every situation it was the same result as the fruits.
Here are some observations I made from today's therapy:
- I can understand a woman's voice much easier than a man's.
- Often I could hear one part of what was said. For instance, I could hear the two in forty-two so I could guess the correct answer in some cases.
- If I couldn't understand the spoken word at first, it would eventually come to me the more I hit the repeat button. It was like a fuzzy picture slowly coming into focus.
- By having four choices, you can often figure out what is being said by the process of elimination.
- I would never ask anyone to repeat something as many times as I had repeats during these tests!
I'm glad I moved on from testing myself on pure tone discrimination. I needed to get my confidence level back up since low confidence is yet one more thing that can hinder how well I comprehend. I've barely scratched the surface on what is available on Angel Sounds. I'll be writing more on how my therapy progresses in future postings.
When you get a cochlear implant, the world opens up to you in a variety of sounds you might have never before heard, or you heard it so long ago you don't remember ever hearing them. I'm constantly hearing new things and when I do, I go on a hunt to figure out where the sound is coming from and what's making it.
One time I was home alone and I heard a weird noise, like the rhythmic ticking of a clock. I knew it couldn't be a clock because the only clocks nearby were the digital ones on the microwave and stove. I stood quietly in the middle of the kitchen listening intently, trying to figure out the direction of the sound. When I couldn't locate the source, I decided to wait until someone with reliable hearing could help me. Later that day when I was fixing dinner I heard the sound again and this time I asked Tom what it was. He went to the sink and pointed in the direction of the drain. It was water dripping from the black rubber shield that protects unwanted things from falling into the garbage disposal. I thought, "You've got to be kidding me!" All these years I assumed something like that would create a soft sound, but that's probably because with a hearing aid sounds were amplified and blended together. With a CI, sounds are much crisper, something I'm slowly adjusting to.
And speaking of noises that come from the sink, our water softener cycles at odd times and when it does, it sounds like someone is playing with water in the cabinet below the sink. It's amazing to me how loud gurgling water can be. I can hear it clearly in the next room, even with the TV playing.
A couple of weeks ago I was working in our home office while Noah was practicing the piano in the next room. I had just noticed a sound I didn't recognize, at least since getting my CI. Before I could stop what I was doing and search, Noah ran into the office to tell me it was hailing like crazy. I'm not sure if what I heard was the hail hitting the cement of the sidewalk and driveway or the branches of the tree. Maybe it was both, but either way, it was such a cool sound.
All of these sounds have one thing in common -- water, or some form of it. It is amazing to me how loud water can be. With nothing but blue skies forecast for the next week, I guess I'll have to wait to hear more water from Mother Nature. In the meantime, I'll keep alert for more noises coming from strange places.
Last week I had another mapping and it was long overdue. I could tell I wasn't distinguishing sounds as well as I had about three weeks before seeing my audiologist.
One of the first things my audiologist asks me at every appointment is how things are sounding, how I'm doing with my CI. This time I found myself struggling to convey exactly how I knew I wasn't hearing as well and needed my mapping tweaked. When you are hard-of-hearing (HOH), you get used to saying, "what" all the time so maybe the more appropriate person to ask is the HOH person's significant other. They know when you've been asking for repeats.
But, it's more than saying, "what" every other sentence. It's the little things. Like how suddenly you don't notice the microwave beeping even though you heard it just fine the previous day. Or, how sounds in the upper range aren't distinguishable and seem to be soft around the edges.
A cochlear implant has 22 electrodes. With natural hearing, a person has the equivalent of 3,000 (no, that is not a typo. There really should be a comma followed by three zeros). When I tell people this little fact, it tends to hit home how much a cochlear implant falls short of replacing "normal" hearing.
Every mapping starts out with what is commonly referred to as "firing up the electrodes". Every time we go through this exercise, I think of a car revving its engine and the phrase "firing on all cylinders". My audiologist knows how much I don't like this because she always says something like, "okay, here's the part everyone loves". At least I'm not alone. This step involves me staring off and listening intently for beeps. If I hear the beeps I tell her how many (from 1 to 3). Sometimes I think I'm hearing beeps, so I hesitate and think, "did I really hear them, or did I think I heard them?" I am not good as this black and white test, either you heard them or you didn't. I guess I'm trying too hard and want to hear them so badly that I start having phantom hearing (yes, there really is such a thing). My desire to be right conflicts with my desire to hear and it's this constant struggle that I find so exhausting and frustrating. And when there is a long gap of me just sitting there waiting for a beep, I'm positive something has gone haywire. That's when I'm pretty sure I've lost more than just my hearing.
Before my audiologist transferred my new program to my CI processor, she told me that she had previously turned off the first four electrodes, but now she wanted to try turning them back on. These electrodes are for the higher frequencies and apparently I wasn't tolerating them well in the beginning. When she turned them on, I could tell a big difference. Everything sounded too loud. After running a few tests to see if I could tolerate them, we came to the conclusion that I should start with just one of the four and see if I can work my way into all of them.
So now I'm back to everyone sounding like munchkins from The Lollipop Guild. Over time normal voices should come back to me. In the meantime, my bionic ear is revving up its engine and trying as hard as it can to do its best.
On Saturday night I went to my first party since getting my CI. And as a newbie to the CI world, I went not as prepared as I should have been.
It was an office party and held in a big ballroom with roughly 40 people sitting at round tables that sat eight. We got there late so we didn't have many options in where to sit. We took two seats at a table that put my back to most of the other tables. As a result, I couldn't see the wait staff coming toward me. On multiple occasions someone had to prompt me that a wait staff had asked me a question. The first time this happened, it wasn't a big deal. But when it happened repeatedly, I started to feel like a zoned-out zombie. Lesson #1 takeaway - arrive early so you can pick a seat that strategically maximizes your ability to see and hear what's going on around you.
I tried following the conversation taking place shortly after our salads arrived. Most of the time I was able to hear just enough to know the topic, but not enough to feel comfortable adding to it. My bionic ear wanted to focus on all the other conversations taking place behind me even though my brain couldn't make sense of them and they sounded like distant gobbledygook. I wanted so badly to shut out the noise so I could focus only on what was right in front of me. Finally, it dawned on me that I needed to change programs on my CI, from my general setting to the one called "cafe" that would enable the processor to focus on sounds to the side and front of me. I thought I'd discreetly change the program using the remote I remembered to put in my purse. There was only one small problem. I forgot to check the remote before we left and the battery had died. Luckily the programs can be changed directly on the processor. I reached up and pushed the button until I heard the four beeps that indicated it was in the fourth program, the cafe setting. Lesson # 2 takeaway - always make sure you have your remote completely charged before you leave the house.
Since my speech discrimination was still not where I wanted it, I put my hearing aid in my right ear. My audiologist told me it was okay to wear it with my CI when I needed to and I knew going into the party I would definitely need all the help I could get. What I wasn't expecting was to struggle so much to hear people who were only sitting a couple of seats away from me. I began to panic when it quickly became obvious to me that I couldn't hear much of the conversation. I even took out my hearing aid to see if I had somehow not put the battery in, but no such luck. For some reason, I just didn't catch more than maybe 50% of the words. Finally, I reached up to my hearing aid and turned up the volume a couple of notches, but this didn't help as much as I hoped. Lesson #3 takeaway - relax! Stress can wreck havoc on your hearing.
If you learn from lessons #1 and #2, they will make it much easier for you to follow lesson #3. Remember, it's a party so try to have a good time and go with the flow. Do the best you can with what you have, something I strive to do in every aspect of my life.
