very proud and happy

Yesterday I had some fine tuning on three programs that were downloaded into the processor. By the end of the day I had a fourth program installed and I am to spend the weekend exploring the programs to see what makes the most sense in sound for me. They each have different speeds in pulses per second (250, 500, 900 and 1200 pps). We found during the programming, with the faster pulses per second (1200), I was experiencing facial twitches on the side of my face. Some electrodes affecting my face were either taken off the map or lowered in volume. There is an expectation I won't do as well with the faster speeds, but it doesn't mean I am being deprived of quality in sound. Different pulse rates work differently for everyone. However, if I do favor this faster map, it means the audiologist may not have as much flexibility to work with it because of the facial twitching. In other words the slower maps may provide more flexibility and opportunity for fine tuning. Yesterday morning I was hooked back up to the computer and Lisa, another audiologist on the team, worked away at more programming and asked tons of questions. This is good speech practice as I have to come up with a correct answer or the outcome of my mapping is affected if I give poor feedback!

At lunchtime, Mom, Di and I were craving protein and we devoured hamburgers at Vera's, a hot spot on Davie street. I returned back to the hospital with more mental clarity. Another CI team member, audiologist Cindy, suggested we try some word recognition tests. My immediate thought was there was NO WAY I would do well - I'd announced first thing in the morning that I had zero sense of speech recognition even though I was making sense of some environmental sounds. (A vehicle engine, for instance). Well, the testing turned out to be the highlight of the day. Even though these were simple tests with slow speech in a quiet room, I was doing very well in speech understanding in the beginning levels (and jumping excitedly here) without lipreading! I didn't think to ask her how many levels there are in these Speech Recognition tests, it doesn't matter, I was just so excited at the outcome. I missed one word -I just don't hear the word "coughdrop" - it sounds like "Kah-traph." At any rate it was a most encouraging session and Cindy discussed how we can improve communication in order for me to develop better speech understanding. Apparently the CI receives sound best when speakers are directly in front of me. It's not unlike how people have been speaking to me.

I came home with two audio books from the audiology library to practice with and they were lots of fun for me. A new hobby for me, listening to books. I also listened to a few familiar musical artists and was able to follow the lyrics. All this on my second day of activation. Charles Dickens sums it up perfectly for me: