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.
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 months ago, and he is excellent. A silver lining to the rather dark cloud of frustration I was under, after waiting for an hour with no information!
I didn't get to see a Speech and Language Therapist (SLT), unfortunately, as there was no colleague available to provide cover for the double booking. I'll have to return another time for that. A shame as I was looking forward to doing the speech comprehension test to see how much more I'm understanding without lipreading, compared to last time.
In an attempt to make it up to me, the staff are going to try and schedule three appointments on one day for my next trip to London. A SLT appointment, a bonus follow-up audiology appointment, and an appointment to see an ENT specialist.
Why ENT? Well, I have never had the best sense of smell (my nose was always the last one to notice that my child had a dirty nappy!) but it slowly dawned on me in late August that my sense of smell was getting worse, and in fact had completely gone. I waved perfume bottles, vinegar bottles and essential oils under my nose, to no avail. I could not smell a thing. In September I also lost my sense of taste, to the extent that at one point I could not even taste Bovril on my toast (let's not get judgemental here about why I like Bovril on my toast, please...) - not even the salty tang. Strangely enough, after a weekend with my parents in early October (the power of the wonderful Suffolk air?) my taste started to return, and by the end of October my taste was pretty much back to normal. My smell however has remained at zero. Hence the ENT referral. In London rather than Guildford, just in case it's linked to the CI operation, although that seems unlikely, given that onset was around 4 months after the operation in March.
Anyway, back to my audiology appointment...
He gave me some new batteries for my CI, including a "zinc air battery pack" - which is a battery that holds two disposable hearing aid (zinc air) batteries inside. Excellent for holidays, especially when camping and there's no easy access to power to charge my reusable batteries. Or if I leave my charger behind....
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| 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 months ago, and he is excellent. A silver lining to the rather dark cloud of frustration I was under, after waiting for an hour with no information!
I didn't get to see a Speech and Language Therapist (SLT), unfortunately, as there was no colleague available to provide cover for the double booking. I'll have to return another time for that. A shame as I was looking forward to doing the speech comprehension test to see how much more I'm understanding without lipreading, compared to last time.
In an attempt to make it up to me, the staff are going to try and schedule three appointments on one day for my next trip to London. A SLT appointment, a bonus follow-up audiology appointment, and an appointment to see an ENT specialist.
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| Old sign on a new building |
Anyway, back to my audiology appointment...
He gave me some new batteries for my CI, including a "zinc air battery pack" - which is a battery that holds two disposable hearing aid (zinc air) batteries inside. Excellent for holidays, especially when camping and there's no easy access to power to charge my reusable batteries. Or if I leave my charger behind....
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| Zinc air battery pack |
I won't bore you with the details, but for my future reference, the audiologist spent the first half of the appointment tweaking my CI programming:
- boosting the gain a little more as I've adjusted to that a little more in the 4 months since my last audiology appointment in July, and tweaking the settings a little bit
- changing the T-loop programme to be 100% T-loop (and zero environmental mic)
- adding in an AquaMic programme, and giving me extra magnets for my AquaMic headpiece...
I think this is the first time I've mentioned the AquaMic. That's the clever gadget I have been given that makes my CI 100% waterproof for going in the pool each week with my younger son C at his swimming session. It's basically a secure waterproof box (AquaCase) for my CI to sit in (which clips to my swimsuit strap), with a special long lead to a waterproof headpiece, complete with waterproof built in microphone (AquaMic).
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| AquaCase and AquaMic |
This has revolutionised swimming sessions with my boys! No longer the choice of keeping my hearing device in, but being unable to go in deep water, on flumes, etc, and always being nervous about it getting wet. Or not having it in, and really struggling to communicate! My younger son C has definitely relaxed more in the water now, largely because I'm more relaxed, and as I'm happily dunking my head under water, so he's slowly becoming happier about doing that too. A great outcome! 😀
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| My new hearing aid: a Phonak Naida Link UP (UltraPower) |
The second half of my audiology appointment was the bit that I had been anticipating with mixed feelings! Fitting a new hearing aid for my right ear. Other than the 5 days in Dartmoor at the end of August, it's been over six months since I've had a hearing aid in that ear. In the past when I've been fitted with new hearing aids it's been a tiring 6 weeks of adjustment, so I was slightly apprehensive about what the adjustment period would be like this time. It shouldn't be anything like the 8+ weeks of exhaustion I experienced after the CI switch-on. But I was sure there would be some adjustment period.
Having this six month break, plus all the adjustment to a CI in the other ear, means I have no fresh memory of how my old hearing aid was programmed. So I'm not mentally comparing to my old hearing aid and thinking that 'this sounds wrong', or 'that's not right'. Which was the huge challenge I faced many years ago when I was moved from analogue to digital hearing aids with no break between. I really struggled with that change, and had to have many many follow-up appointments to tweak settings until I was happy.
My challenge now, however, is that I have a CI in one ear, and a hearing aid in the other ear (this is called Bimodal - I sound like I've developed some kind of superpower. Bimodal Jean!). It's called a "Link" hearing aid because it is designed to work with the CI, and they communicate (link) with each other. It's programmed very differently from my hearing aids before, as it's no longer working hard to try and amplify high frequencies - the CI can pick those up. So it's focusing more on lower frequencies. So I now have two very different sound inputs, and my brain has to take these inputs and figure out what on earth to do with them!
Sometimes I'm hearing the same sound in both ears, each sounding differently. So my son's voices: via the CI they sound 'normal', quite precise and clear, in quiet rooms. Via the hearing aid they sound very scratchy, gravelly and echoey. My husband Stuart actually sounds a little more himself again, the hearing aid seems to be picking up more of the bass tones from his deep voice. Listening to voices emphasises to me how far I've come with the CI, that the clarity of voices is significantly better via the CI than via a hearing aid.
Other times I'm aware of hearing a sound through one ear and not the other ear. Today I was in the supermarket using the self-checkout. In my right ear, via the hearing aid, I was hearing a lot of background noise - people chatting, the general noise of a large, busy supermarket. In my left ear, via the CI, there was some buzz of background noise but I was clearly hearing the beep of the scanner, the automated voice of the checkout machine, the ping of the card reader. That last sound I never heard with hearing aids - I didn't even know card readers made a noise to indicate successful reading of your contactless card, until very recently! I'm hoping that with time my brain will stop noticing which sounds come from which ear, and just accept the sounds, merge them together in some central database, and feed me the result. I'm not sure it'll ever be quite that simple, but something a little less conscious than at present would be welcome, as it's rather tiring! At Stuart's suggestion, I'm just wearing the hearing aid for half a day at the moment, because otherwise I'm half dead by bedtime - the boys' bedtime, not mine!
Hopefully I'll be back before too long with an update on how things are progressing with the aids...
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