I've had my reimplanted ear turned on for a little over two months now, and things are slowly improving. I have come to realize just how impatient I am! I have been going back to AVT and trying to get in the habit of do listening exercises. It's funny, when I got implanted the first time around everything was so exciting and new. I was eager to hear everything I could, and could not do enough listening practice. Now that I'm being reimplanted I guess you could say the excitement is gone and I just want to go back to hearing like I could before!
I've started realizing that I am totally being too hard on myself. I had a mapping today and did my fist set of testing with the new implant afterwards. My audiogram was at 10-15 dB across the board, and we also did single syllable word testing. Those were pretty difficult, and I'll admit to feeling defeated and absolutely certain I was getting every single one wrong. I was definitely surprised when my audiologist told me I had scored 74% correct! It's not where that ear was before (I've consistently scored at 90-95% previously), but it's not bad at all. I know progress was much faster when I got this ear implanted the first time, so I can't help but constantly compare. My AVT will tell me I'm doing great for two months out, and I can't help myself in saying "But last time I could talk on the phone just a few days after it was turned on!" I also looked back at an old post and saw that 4 days post activation when I went bilateral, I scored 60% on the same test (four days this time around I couldn't hear anything!).
I need to stop the constant comparisons and just accept the progress as it comes. I should not be getting discouraged when I am clearly doing well, I just need to not have such ridiculous expectations. The one thing that bothers me is that voices just don't sound right. I can understand them, but they don't sound the way they should. I can only hope that continues to improve with time as well. Actually, I can do more than hope. I can do some of that practice that I've been avoiding :)
Hi! I talked to a gentleman who said his CI was so hard to map- until they used the same method as for babies, and that worked really well as a baseline for him ;). I hope you get something that sounds right to you. It would've nice to have summer sound right, right? Bon courage!
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