One Year Activation Anniversary

Yikes! I've been neglecting this blog! I have a few minutes to scribble a bit.

One year ago today my CI was activated. And it has been nearly 8 months since my last post here. My CI hearing has changed and improved significantly since then. Everything is better. Pitch sounds almost normal, music sounds like music, voices are voices. I function almost like a normal hearing person. Only very noisy situations can put me at a disadvantage, but it is still much better than I was doing with hearing aids. I never dreamed that a CI could sound as good as it does.

I haven't need much adjustment to my CI in a long time. My last mapping was in May. I am now using mostly a single setting for all situations:

• IDR (Input Dynamic Range) 75
• Hi-Res-S w/F-120
• 50/50 T-Mic/Built-in Mic

I sometimes switch to 100% T-Mic in windy or very noisy situations. The IDR of 75 is at almost the max of 80. I tried 80 and noticed a little too much background electronic noise. It took a while to get used to running at 75, after using 60, because there is more low-level environmental sounds coming in, so it seems noisier. But I soon noticed a definite improvement in speech discrimination -- even in noise. Plus, I like hearing everything now. Even the scritchy scratchy tickety tick sound of a hard drive in a computer, ticking clocks, and all sorts of everyday sounds.

I stopped using my hearing aid in my right ear way back in April. At first because it stopped working. And then I noticed I liked not dealing with the higher frequency pitch mismatch between the two sides. It was like a tug-of-war. Now, without the hearing aid, my right ear just fills in the low frequencies that are missing from the CI quite well. I will probably get my hearing aid repaired next year and give it a try again now that my CI ear and brain have mostly normalized the pitch. I suspect that if I can get them working good together it might help picking voices out of noise.

My CI center closed over the summer (due to the surgeon suffering a severe injury that sadly ended his surgical career), so I requested my medical records. One interesting thing I learned was that I was implanted with the straight array (1j), not the pre-curved array (helix). I thought I was going to get the helix, so I don't know why the straight array was used. In fact, I didn't even know it was an option at the time I was making the choice of CI -- I thought Advanced Bionics had switched to the curved array. Odd, but I'm not complaining, especially considering my outcome.

The T-Mic on my CI failed a couple of weeks ago. Because I use a 50/50 setting, I didn't know what was wrong at first because the other mic was still working. Things just sounded different, and the phone sounded really weak. Once it dawned on me what was wrong, and confirmed by switching to a 100% T-Mic setting and getting nothing, I swapped in my backup T-Mic and all was well again. Fortunately I was just under the 1-year warranty cut-off, so AB shipped me a replacement at no charge.

Back to the grind!