Jean's CI Journey

2020.  A New Year, and a new decade.  Social media is full of people sharing photos and stories to show how the last decade has changed them.  For me, this last year has seen so much change, it's hard to think further back than that, let alone a whole ten years.  On the hearing front it's increasingly hard to think back further than 8th May 2019, when my CI was switched on and I was launched into my new hearing journey. Wed 8th May 2019 - a significant date for me... My last blog post was shortly after I started wearing the hearing aid again on the right.  A couple of days in, and I was finding it very tiring.  To my surprise, by the time I reached two weeks of being bimodal (CI plus hearing aid), things were back to normal on the energy front, and my brain seemed to be very comfortable with merging the different sounds in each ear.  The transition was so much quicker than I expected. In fact I became so used to it, that just the next week, whe...

So, after a long silence, I'm back online! This has been a busy autumn term for my family, for various reasons, and writing blog posts dropped rather low down the priority list - so low that at times it disappeared completely.  However, a visit to the audiologist this week has revived the desire to blog, so tonight I've carved out some time to tap out an update. New building for the merged Royal National ENT & Eastman Dental hospitals I won't go into all the details, but my visit to the audiology department in their shiny new building, just a few blocks from the Arup offices where I used to work in Central London, didn't start well.  Bottom line was that issues arising from the move (a month ago) are still being ironed out, and both my audiologist and speech therapist had been double booked, so were unable to see me.  Thankfully there was another senior audiologist who was free and willing to see me.  In fact he'd done my assessment  for the CI, 18 mon...

[This blog post is dedicated to my wonderful husband who took the boys to an adventure playground (and swimming in a freezing lake!) for a few hours so I could sit at a picnic table with the laptop and write this. Thank you, Stuart.] As predicted, school holidays and blogging do not mix - not for me, anyway.  Nor do school holidays and doing homework.  I think that's a fairly universal issue though, one that most people have experienced at some point in their lives!  It's been a great summer, which has really flown by for us, but I have reached the end of each day with little energy and no inclination for getting the laptop out to do listening exercises.  The idea of doing it with the boys simply hasn't materialised, as we've been out and about so much, with very little time at home.  We've also had the excitement of my oldest nephew, and his wife, staying with us for the whole summer, and house-sitting for us while we've been away.  The boys have very mu...

On Friday I had my ~4 month checkup at the hospital.  I saw the specialist nurse for about 5 minutes.  She looked in my ears, asked if there were any problems, and gave me a clean bill of health!  I mentioned the issues I'd had a couple of weeks ago, with soreness around the implant area.  But since it has pretty well gone now, she wasn't able to give any insights into their cause other than to speculate that it was either an infection or some kind of mild neuralgia.  Since my pain wasn't intense or shooting, this doesn't seem very likely, but I guess that as long as it's not happening now, it doesn't really matter what it was... I also had appointments with the audiologist and speech therapist. The audiologist did the usual tests of each one of the 16 channels, optimising their settings, and giving me a bit more gain in the lower frequencies as we found I was able to tolerate some increase there.  He hopes that this might enable me to hear the lower fr...

So, I've reached 9 weeks today since switch-on.  I've decided to give up on counting the days, as it's taking a bit long to calculate (I managed to get a degree in Engineering, but mental arithmetic is not my strongest point, as my husband will be the first to point out!), and so now I'll count weeks instead.  These blog posts will probably become less frequent from here on, as noticeable and newsworthy changes in my hearing are likely to be fewer and farther between. Around the time of my last post I noticed that the left side of my head (the implanted side) was becoming more and more umcomfortable.  I couldn't sleep on that side, and after a few days the ache seemed to be spreading down the side of my face into my jaw.  Stuart ended up phoning the hospital on the Friday afternoon for me, and I was advised to take painkillers over the weekend and go in on Monday morning to see the CI clinic doctor.  In fact I never made it to the clinic, as on Saturday I slep...

This afternoon I had my fourth hospital appointment.  Some interesting things I've found out, to share/note down for my own records. Firstly, to my great surprise, the audiologist declared that I've finished working my way up through the gains, and now it's time to focus on differentiating between sounds.  He said that at the very first switch-on appointment they'd done some tests to measure my response to sounds, which gave them an indication of what gain level I was likely to end up at.  I hadn't realised this.  Broadly speaking, I've reached these markers (some frequencies I'm a bit higher, and some a bit lower). I also had a hearing test, and the results are shown below, along with my last test from the 31st May, for comparison.  It's a small increase, but basically I'm averaging around 30-35dB, which is pretty much what they expect (I was originally told they are aiming for the window 20-40dB, so I'm nearly in the middle of that).  So th...