Previous and latest hearing tests

Dec 21 Audiogram

I had my last hearing test and mapping back on December 21st. I had some basic increases in my mapping as we are still trying to get me use to high frequencies. The following audiogram shows my test results a month after my activation (Nov 9) and the slight improvement I had a month after that (Dec 21). I do not have a copy of the audiogram from today, but only low frequencies increased slightly with my high frequencies remaining the same.

Speech test with background noise

This is a speech test from Dec 21st. I was to repeat 10 sentences as I "think" I heard them; one is done with quiet and the other is with noise added. As you can see, I did exceptionally well on both of these tests back in December, getting 65% accuracy in quiet and 53% in noise.

Speech test with no background noise

The bad news, today's speech test was pretty bad. I only got 22% accuracy on both tests. In my defense, the vocal level "seemed" quieter than it should've been and if this is so, it's likely because of whatever is going on lately that has been affecting my quality of hearing with the CI. For instance, I have been hearing voices sound "crackled" every now and then and just last night, the CI sounded really soft and i had to turn the volume all the way up to hear at where I should be hearing.




























Other than that, I saw my surgeon about my vertigo, nausea, headaches, tinnitus, and facial pain. At first, he was just ready to let me leave and said he thinks my symptoms are just because my ear is adapting to the implant and it should go away eventually. Then I mentioned that the vertigo seems to mostly occur when I'm laying down and he's convinced it's Benign Positional Vertigo. So to fix that, I have to do some really boring "exercise" for 10 minutes, 3 x a day for 2 weeks. There's a 95% success rate that it will go away, but there's a 33% chance it will come back and all I can do is repeat the exercises. I guess the nausea/vomiting just goes hand-in-hand with vertigo-like attacks?? Other than that, he thinks my facial pain and headaches, if not most of the symptoms, are related to my TMJ and that my right jaw is possibly inflamed. The end. He didn't even look in my ear or anything or suggest a CAT scan. What about how I feel "unstable" visually? Does this mean I now have an vision issue on top of everything else? I mean, the unstableness can be correlated to when someone has.. dizziness... my eyes could not focus on movement without giving me nausea and a headache and sometimes something as simple as walking makes my eyes feel like they are reseting themselves because of the thumping of my walk, or the thumping from being in a car. Make sense? I suppose my surgeon would say it's a balance issue and part of the healing. So, I guess all I can do is get a night guard (for my mouth) and practice the exercises and see how I'm doing in 2 weeks. If my attacks hit again, I just take the meds I already have, although the surgeon was specific in saying I should not take the drugs too often unless I really need them.

Guess what I'm hearing right now? Not sure really, but it's sounded like an air conditioner is going off IN my ear since I got the mapping increased. Another reason I'm sure I didn't do too well on the audiology test because the humming is distracting.

I've got another audiology test in a month as a precaution to be sure that my test today was only a temporary setback. If my test results next month are like they were today, then there's possibly something wrong the CI or the CI+my brain/ear/whatever.