My New Cellphone (and why you shouldn't rely on pockets to hold your keys)

About a week ago I got a new phone. Prior to that, I had a really awesome Sidekick 2008. I was in LOVE with this phone. I'm a big texter, so it was perfect for me with its QWERTY keyboard, and it was my first "smartphone" which was pretty cool, and it had all these random nifty features. Some I didn't use, but the internet was pretty cool! Plus, it had removable covers and this website where you could make your own personalized cover for the same price! I made this really cute pink one with my name and some music notes, and an adorable picture of my dog.


Okay, after all this gushing I'm even starting to ask myself why I got a new phone! But, truth be told, hearing on that phone was a disaster. It was absolutely not T-coil (or hearing aid) compatible, and even without T-coil I got some interference. Sometimes I need/want to use the phone, so just being able to text was not optimal.


My phone contract was coming to an end and my Sidekick kept malfunctioning and not letting ,e text. Not good! So, I decided it was time to research ( a lot!) for a new phone. One thing I discovered is that every single major phone company I looked up has a list of all their hearing aid compatible phones. This was really helpful, and most of them also listed the ratings (M3, or M4 and/or T3 and T4)

Here are the links, if anyone is interested.

T-Mobile (scroll down towards the bottom)
Verizon
at&t
Sprint (For more info on their TTY compatible phones and Relay services, and data-only plans click here)

I looked at all of these websites and the features of each phone. I went to T-Mobile (my provider with my Sidekick), Verizon, and at&t and tried out all of their hearing aid compatible phones. Some interesting things I found out were that T-mobile has no M4 or T4 phone, only M3/T3, which is a lower rating. When we went by the at&t store, they claimed to have only one hearing aid compatible phone, which was a really basic phone. So, we scratched at&t off of the list. I tried the phones at T-Mobile, both with and without T-coil, and found that they were still somewhat hard to hear on. Plus all the cool phones (G1 and MyTouch, anyone?) were not hearing aid compatible. I realllly wanted one with a full keyboard, and that I could hear on, it didn't even have to be a "nice" phone. So off to Verizon we went.



I was surprised that they had quite a few phone that had T4 as well as M4 ratings. They had all kinds of cool phones- Blackberries, touch screens, full keyboards, - ALL with M4 T4 ratings! Sweet! I tried out quite a few, and finally settled on, drumroll....

The LG EnV Touch! It has a full QWERTY keyboard, as well as a touch screen (with keyboard) on the outside when you shut it. It has a rating of M4/T4 and I could hear well on it when I tried it out in the store. The guy even gave me these two pink covers that I can put on it! Yeahh!

It works well, and I really like it. It has most of the features that my Sidekick had. The one thing I don't like is that Verizon apparently had a 160 character text limit to non-Verizon users...who knew?! I was kind of annoyed, especially since they didn't tell us. My friends thought it was pretty funny "No more of your infamous 5 page long texts!" Oh well! I can still send and then finish the message in a new text message, so I can live with that.

It seems I need a new mapping, though. I tried out the phone a few weeks before I bought it, and I could hear great! But my friend called me the day after I got it, and I could barely hear her. I'm not going to go into all the details (because I can't without making myself sound like a complete idiot) but I'm just going to say that I didn't hear the time we were going to the movies, and had to beg one of my other friends to find out. She refused, but it all worked out in the end.

I have since tried using the phone on my left (new) ear with much more success! I was delighted with that! And the thing is, you never know when you'll need to call someone. I'm saying this 10 minutes after getting into my house after being locked out for 25 minutes. That definitely required me to make a few phone calls! My poor dog has a hurt paw, but he was feeling kind of anxious so I decided to take him on a short walk. My dad was out of town, and my mom decided to take my sister shopping, so I was home alone. So, being the very responsible teenager that I am, I took a key and locked our front door after leaving. We just went down the block, but I could tell Zach (my dog) was getting tired and it was hard for him to hop on three legs. So we walked back to the house. Right as I was about to get the key out, a thought popped in my head, "Wouldn't it suck if I lost my key?" I then reached into my pocket where I had oh-so-safely put the key, and it was nowhere to be found. Panic set in and I turned each of my pockets inside out in desperation. Nothing but a tube of chapstick and my cellphone!

I called my mom, who was pretty angry that I left the house in the first place. After doing her usual, "I'm going to kill you!" she instructed me to retrace my path to see if I could find the key. By then, Zach was completely exhausted, and whenever I tried to get him along with me to come look, he would just go in the street and drink the drain water. So, I tied his leash loosely to a tree branch and went on my way to look for the stupid key. I looked carefully, using my phone as a light since it was now getting dark out. I could not find it! My mom called me again three times, saying she was on the way. The only thing is, she was a good half hour away. Finally, by some miracle, one of our neighbors answered her phone and drove over and brought me a key-- after I'd been sweating out side for 45 minutes! The walk (20 minutes) was shorter than the time I waited!

Don't you hate it when you try to be independent and make a complete fool of yourself?

**UPDATE** I made an even bigger fool of myself... Apparently my jean shorts have a little tiny pocket inside of the normal pocket- perfect for fitting a key! My mom decided to search my shorts and thought it was HILARIOUS when she found it! Me-not so much. At least I didn't lose the key?!

For those of you that are (or are planning to be) bimodal...

Or binaural, or whatever you want to call it. Simply put, wearing both a hearing aid and a CI.

Even though I'm bilateral now, I thought I'd get the word out in case anyone else had the same problem I once had.

When I still wore a hearing aid in my left ear, but had just gotten a CI in my right, I kept running into a problem. My hearing aid was constantly breaking. Sure, it broke before, but this was a constant. Two days or less after getting it repaired, it would break again! And it wasn't like it used to break, where it would just stop working altogether. It would start sounding like static. When someone spoke, all I heard was static. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I could hear and understand crystal-clear with my hearing aid, but I still had some speech recognition in quiet, and could identify voices. When it was broken, it was really quiet I could not understand anything whatsoever! It would bother me more than it helped.

After about the tenth time of it being sent back and repaired, my HA audiologist wanted me to come in to her office to see if there was "anything we could do."

Huh? It's broken!

So after talking for a while, she looked at me sympathetically and said, "You know, we could do a hearing test, just to be sure. It's only one ear, so it won't take that long."

Ohhh I see how it is! They think it's my hearing! No siree!

"No, I'm not doing a hearing test! It's broken! Listen to it if you don't believe me!"

So she did. She thought it sounded "a little funny", and I'm assuming that for me, being deaf, I just notice it a lot more. If you're listening to my HA turned all the way down so that it's tolerable, you're not going to notice that it's a lot quieter!

So we got it replaced, and once again it broke. It must've broken a minimum of twenty times, when finally my audiologist talked to her husband. He's not an audiologist, just some smart, scientific guy. He said that just like a magnet can ruin speakers, they can probably ruin a hearing aid. So if they're ever close together, the CI magnet is probably breaking the hearing aid.

Like when they're in the Dry and Store. Which I'm to lazy to use every night, so I only use it every other night. And then it's broken the next morning.

dingdingding! Finally, twenty hearing aids later, an answer! We invested in another Dry and Store, and from then on, until my second CI surgery, I stored them separately. And it would only break occasionally, if I accidentally held them in the same hand.

I should add that I used to wear a digital hearing , but was not the newest technology at the time (although it was when we bought it!) It was called an Oticon Adapto Power. It was a nice, compact, little hearing aid that used one tiny size 13 battery. Sorry, rambling on here... Just wishing that my CI processors were that small! Some day.. I have no idea if the same thing applies for other hearing aids, or if the magnets don't do anything to them.

So anyway, lesson learned. Don't store magnets near a hearing aid!

France and Ireland

I had a really great time in Paris. It was nice to get away from the Texas heat and I got to see things like the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Pompidou, Orsay, walk down the Champs Elysees and more! It was awesome, and pretty uneventful, besides me getting separated from the rest of my family a few times in the airports, which was kind of frightening (we went on a total of 6 flights).

Arc de Triomphe

After spending 5 nights in Paris, we flew to Dublin, Ireland to spend two nights there. It was quite a change of scenery from Paris, but nice nonetheless. When we got in, we found a taxi to drive us the 45 minute drive from the airport to the hotel. We could not believe how friendly the driver was, chatting with us and giving all sorts of tips about thins to do while we were there. He was quite funny, and was constantly making jokes. None of the cab drivers in Paris were nearly as friendly! My family wondered if all Irish people were so nice, and it seemed that they were!

One thing that I noticed in Dublin, was that in nearly every public building (airports, hotels, etc.), there was this handy little sign.

I guess Ireland is much more "hearing-accessible" than the US. Unfortunately, I tried multiple times and activated my T-coil whenever I saw the sign, to no avail. I couldn't hear any better, and I was only hearing through the mic part of the MT, nothing was coming through the telecoil. When we were talking to the lady at the front desk of our hotel, she showed me a little microphone that was sitting on the desk that is supposed to be what I hear when I turn on the T-coil. I tapped the microphone to see if the sound was coming through, and it wasn't. Oh, well. Maybe there is some sort of trick to it...

We were pretty exhausted from all of the sightseeing we did in Paris, so we settled on going on a bus that brought us around to all the sights, recommended by our oh-so-awesome taxi driver. When looking at the brochure, we saw that some of the buses had "text for the hearing-impaired." Might as well try it out!

We had to wait for a certain bus that had a screen with a transcript of what was said. The screen was on the indoor part of the bus (it also had an upstairs part without a roof), and you had to sit in a certain spot in order to see the screen. I was pretty grateful for it, since everyone else had to listen to it using earbuds that plugged into the bus. Half of them didn't work, and I'm pretty sure I would have trouble understanding a recorded voice with an Irish accent using earbuds.

The thing is, the bus was realllllly hot, and I'm one of those people who tends to get motion sickness while reading in a moving vehicle. Plus, it's really hard to look out the window and see something when you're also trying to read about it. So, after about 10 or so stops, I gave up, and went upstairs for some fresh air. The information was getting kind of boring anyway, so I didn't really mind!

We had to catch a flight the next morning to spend another night in Paris (it was some sort of special deal, that we had to go to Dublin and back to Paris and it made the whole thing cheaper, supposedly) and went in another taxi. This time the driver was in his own little world, and didn't really say much. We noticed how we didn't go on a highway this time, or pass nearly as much scenery. We got to the airport and he charged us 20 euros. That was when we realized the super-friendly taxi driver was not what he seemed to be at all. We had paid him 70 euros. We could not believe it! We had been ripped off! That incident made me lose some trust in people..

Overall, it was a great trip and I am so glad we went! There were a few times that I was frustrated that my French vocabulary wasn't bigger, and my entire family pretty much relied on my sister to be our interpreter. It was fun though!

Nothing says "Welcome Home!"....

Like a dizziness attack. And a broken A/C. Add that to my injured knee and I am BEAT!

Europe was great! I will post all about it later. For now, I'm off to take a Bonine and hope that all my problems disappear when I wake up. Don't we all!