Need I say more?
Just kidding. But seriously, see the improvement from basically pre-surgery to one month after activation (2 months after surgery)?? Yea!
It was not a thorough evaluation I had today, but a quickie test to see how I'm doing cause I asked when I'd be able to get another beep test and she said at 3 months (in 2 more months), but she has so much free time and was like "why not?" (she = audiologist).
I mentioned to her the speech test I did last night and she agrees I'm where I should be, but after the test she did, realized I really gotta do much speech therapy, so sent me home with copies to practice with my husband. I don't even think my audiologist knows how I can't hear the difference between ring and joke. But what can we say? Just gotta practice. And hopefully my brain will learn to distinguish.
Other than that, I had my IDR increased to 80, the max, I assume, and my electrode levels increased about 5-15 points (over the 3 settings I have on the CI, as I adapt to each level to prepare for another increase in 2 weeks). I asked her how much the levels range from, and although I didn't get a super clear answer, she mentioned that most people with the CI reach the 200-250 range and remain there... while right now, I'm ranging between 150s to as low as 115 in the high frequencies. Although the aim is to get all the frequencies leveled, it's something that I won't achieve for another 3-6 months cause the high frequencies take a lot of time to get use to (for obvious reasons- no one wants cymbals going off next to their head all day).
Other than all this, I go back in two more weeks for some more tweaking and in about 2 months, I'll have another hearing test, and maybe a speech test, to see how I'm really doing. Oh, and she mentioned my own speech has already improved and that my voice is more volume appropriate. haha. Which was funny and kinda nice to hear cause I usually get insulted that I speak too low or too loud (too loud compared to a whisper, psh), and it use to hurt my feelings cause people were asking me to "speak up" which makes me feel like I was yelling and it was just way uncomfortable. Plus, it's always strange when normal hearing people gotta ask a deaf/hard of hearing person to speak up to begin with... isn't it? :-)
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Cool blog. My daughter is almost 4 and has had CIs since she was 2. I remember she had a graph done like this. Her recent graph had her at 5-10db across all frequencies. It slowly crept up as her auditory nerve bonded to the CI and they cranked the power up.
ReplyDeleteI hope you continue to progress well.