Today’s my one-year activation anniversary (activersary?). While I can’t say I’m to the point yet where things sound normal, I am definitely glad I did this. Compared to before my hearing loss, things don’t sound as good…but compared to what my hearing would be like without the CI, it’s amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To recap: Going into my surgery, I had one bad ear (now the implanted one), which had about 10% word recognition, and one good ear (mild loss, about 80% word recognition). Just a couple weeks after the surgery, before I was even activated, my good ear had another sudden loss and is now at about 40% word recognition. Before that, the CI had been a “nice to have”, but after that it became a necessity. A year later, I have the CI in my left ear and a linked hearing aid in the right; I hear better with both together than I do with either one on its own, although the CI is definitely better in terms of clarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve felt like I’ve been on a plateau for the last 6 months or so — I can recognize and distinguish different voices with no problems, but they still sound sort of like they have two layers to them: one normal, the other a little bit scratchy\/echoey, like it’s coming through a radio that’s not quite tuned correctly. Music still sounds discordant and wrong, and I can’t hear harmonies very well (which makes me sad because I love harmonies), although I can easily recognize songs I know, distinguish between different instruments, and understand lyrics as long as they’re reasonably clear. I keep hoping that this will get better with time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don’t have a current word-recognition score, as my last test and mapping were 6 months ago (74% on individual words, 84% on phonemes, and over 90% on sentences). I figure I’ll go in next month and see where things stand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today’s my one-year activation anniversary (activersary?). While I can’t say I’m to the point yet where things sound normal, I am definitely glad I did this. Compared to before my hearing loss, things don’t sound as good…but compared to what my hearing would be like without the CI, it’s amazing. To recap: Going into my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":142,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions\/142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monster-island.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}