I've been a bit slow to start writing this blog post tonight because I've been (somewhat anxiously!) Googling: "does a CI survive a dunk in the bath?". I was cleaning the boys' ears at bathtime tonight, and I just tilted my head to the left to look into C's ear (as you do) and the processor slipped off my ear and for a split second hung from my magnetic headpiece before that too slipped off my head and the whole thing went splosh into the deep end of the bath. I grabbed it immediately, and it's now in my drying box (little gadget with fan and heating element that I put my device into every night) for a 2.5hour cycle. Just one more hour until I can get it out and find out if it still works.... 😧
Meantime, might as well keep myself occupied....
Cycling to the train station turned out to be no big deal. It was my first time cycling alone since the CI switch on. To put it simply, while cycling, I couldn't hear a thing. But it was fine. I was safe. No animals or persons were harmed in the process. No sweat broken (it's all downhill anyway...). It made me realise that even with hearing aids, I just didn't really hear much while cycling, so I have always, all my life, relied on my eyes to keep me safe. I did wonder if maybe I should put one of those handlebar mounted rear-view mirrors on my bike. I do have one somewhere (in the loft?!) that my parents gave me when I was a teen...and only now, 20 years later, do I appear to finally be grown up enough to (almost) not care what other people think of me having an "uncool" attachment on my bike! Just when I may not actually need it anymore, if the CI works as well as I'm hoping it eventually will...
The audiologist and the Speech therapist yesterday were pleased with the progress I've made in the first 10 days since switch on. I saw the audiologist first, for the technical bit, programming the CI processor. There are 16 electrodes in my cochlea, numbered from one (the longest one which reaches nearly to the middle of the spiral of the cochlea), through to 16 (at the entrance of the cochlea) This diagram of an Advanced Bionics (my CI manufacturer) electrode should help to explain the numbering:
Each electrode (or contact point) has a channel that can be adjusted independently. The audiologists call this "mapping". At switch-on last week, mapping involved the audiologist testing each of the 16 channels in turn to see if there was a response, and changing the settings until it was just the loud side of a comfortable level for me. That was programme one. He then set up three more programmes (making four in total), each one a little louder than the previous one. So I worked my way through them, moving onto the next one every couple of days, as my brain adjusted to this new input, and learned to tolerate a stronger electrical signal. This week he ran the test again to find my new level of comfort/tolerance, and then set me up with five new programmes to work through this fortnight, before my next appointment on 31st May.
I didn't respond very well to channel number 16 at switch on - the audiologist was increasing the gain, higher and higher, and the sound didn't seem to be getting any louder to me. It's not clear whether this is because the electrode is right on the edge of my cochlear and not working properly/there's not enough contact, or whether it's just because it's the one for the highest frequency sounds, which my brain has never ever heard before, and just doesn't know what to do with it. Yesterday they tried electrode 16 again, and I got a better response, so they are going to leave it on for now. At some point, if it doesn't settle down and start working well, they may switch it off and redistribute the frequencies across the remaining 15 electrodes. I'm told this wouldn't impair the quality of sound I'm getting, as the brain only really needs about 8 electrodes to get a decent range of frequencies. So whether I have 15 or 16 doesn't matter much.
At this appointment the audiologist took me to a sound booth for a hearing test, to test the quietest sounds I could hear at different frequencies. Here's the results:
The top line, with squiggles, is what I could hear with the CI in the hearing test yesterday. I was hearing sounds as quiet as 40dB in some frequencies. By the time I'm fully adjusted to the CI, the quietest sounds I am likely to be able to hear will be in the range 20-40dB, hopefully for all frequencies. The second line, below the squiggly line, is an approximation of what I could hear, with hearing aids (they couldn't find the actual test results). See the difference? Particularly in the higher frequencies where my hearing loss became profound, the hearing aids really struggled to give me any decent volume - hence the drop off on the curve. To give a bit of context when I'm throwing all these dB numbers around, here's a pretty audiogram that shows typical everyday noises, and phonics sounds, and where they sit on an audiogram.
I'm hearing more almost every day. Voices are increasingly sounding like (muted, distant) voices to me. It's still not clear at all - if I shut my eyes I can tell someone is speaking, but not whether male/female/child or anything of what they are saying - but it's still a lot of progress since vibrating booms and beeps less than two weeks ago. Most other sounds are still pretty much monotonous tones, lots of variation in duration and intensity, but not much in frequency (that I can tell).
The speech therapist was doing lots of practice listening with me, to see if I could tell if she was saying a one, two or three syllable word. Without lipreading. All my speech therapy exercises involve pure listening and no lipreading. A whole new ballpark for me. With some of the words I couldn't hear all the syllables, because they were too quiet (eg 'th' or 'ing' - see above diagram for context. So with "lightningbolt" I wouldn't hear the middle syllable) so it's not as straightforward an exercise as it might seem. As well as continuing with recording what sounds I'm hearing, and the paragraph tracking, I have some other homework involving getting Stuart to say "mat", "mash" and "mass", so I can practice telling the difference between "t", "sh" and "s". At the moment I don't really hear "s". What I do hear is a bit of static a split second later, as a sort of echo. This is apparently pretty normal, and with time I'll learn to hear it properly. Meantime I have to be intentional in practicing, and teaching my brain these things, to get the maximum benefit from the CI.
I now have a two week wait until my next appointment. Thankfully no emergency trip to get a replacement device, as I've just found that the CI seems to have survived its unplanned bath! I think I might take it off next time C's ears need cleaning...
Meantime, might as well keep myself occupied....
Cycling to the train station turned out to be no big deal. It was my first time cycling alone since the CI switch on. To put it simply, while cycling, I couldn't hear a thing. But it was fine. I was safe. No animals or persons were harmed in the process. No sweat broken (it's all downhill anyway...). It made me realise that even with hearing aids, I just didn't really hear much while cycling, so I have always, all my life, relied on my eyes to keep me safe. I did wonder if maybe I should put one of those handlebar mounted rear-view mirrors on my bike. I do have one somewhere (in the loft?!) that my parents gave me when I was a teen...and only now, 20 years later, do I appear to finally be grown up enough to (almost) not care what other people think of me having an "uncool" attachment on my bike! Just when I may not actually need it anymore, if the CI works as well as I'm hoping it eventually will...
The audiologist and the Speech therapist yesterday were pleased with the progress I've made in the first 10 days since switch on. I saw the audiologist first, for the technical bit, programming the CI processor. There are 16 electrodes in my cochlea, numbered from one (the longest one which reaches nearly to the middle of the spiral of the cochlea), through to 16 (at the entrance of the cochlea) This diagram of an Advanced Bionics (my CI manufacturer) electrode should help to explain the numbering:
Each electrode (or contact point) has a channel that can be adjusted independently. The audiologists call this "mapping". At switch-on last week, mapping involved the audiologist testing each of the 16 channels in turn to see if there was a response, and changing the settings until it was just the loud side of a comfortable level for me. That was programme one. He then set up three more programmes (making four in total), each one a little louder than the previous one. So I worked my way through them, moving onto the next one every couple of days, as my brain adjusted to this new input, and learned to tolerate a stronger electrical signal. This week he ran the test again to find my new level of comfort/tolerance, and then set me up with five new programmes to work through this fortnight, before my next appointment on 31st May.
I didn't respond very well to channel number 16 at switch on - the audiologist was increasing the gain, higher and higher, and the sound didn't seem to be getting any louder to me. It's not clear whether this is because the electrode is right on the edge of my cochlear and not working properly/there's not enough contact, or whether it's just because it's the one for the highest frequency sounds, which my brain has never ever heard before, and just doesn't know what to do with it. Yesterday they tried electrode 16 again, and I got a better response, so they are going to leave it on for now. At some point, if it doesn't settle down and start working well, they may switch it off and redistribute the frequencies across the remaining 15 electrodes. I'm told this wouldn't impair the quality of sound I'm getting, as the brain only really needs about 8 electrodes to get a decent range of frequencies. So whether I have 15 or 16 doesn't matter much.
At this appointment the audiologist took me to a sound booth for a hearing test, to test the quietest sounds I could hear at different frequencies. Here's the results:
 |
CI audiogram, May 2019: x axis is frequency (Hz, from low to high as you move right)
and y axis is how loud (increasing decibels/volume as you move downwards)
|
The speech therapist was doing lots of practice listening with me, to see if I could tell if she was saying a one, two or three syllable word. Without lipreading. All my speech therapy exercises involve pure listening and no lipreading. A whole new ballpark for me. With some of the words I couldn't hear all the syllables, because they were too quiet (eg 'th' or 'ing' - see above diagram for context. So with "lightningbolt" I wouldn't hear the middle syllable) so it's not as straightforward an exercise as it might seem. As well as continuing with recording what sounds I'm hearing, and the paragraph tracking, I have some other homework involving getting Stuart to say "mat", "mash" and "mass", so I can practice telling the difference between "t", "sh" and "s". At the moment I don't really hear "s". What I do hear is a bit of static a split second later, as a sort of echo. This is apparently pretty normal, and with time I'll learn to hear it properly. Meantime I have to be intentional in practicing, and teaching my brain these things, to get the maximum benefit from the CI.
I now have a two week wait until my next appointment. Thankfully no emergency trip to get a replacement device, as I've just found that the CI seems to have survived its unplanned bath! I think I might take it off next time C's ears need cleaning...
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