25% Auditory Improvement

I had a three month CI check up today. We started with the basic beep test... I'm hearing at the same levels I was three months ago, except my high frequency dropped a notch. In my defense, I've have tinnitus going off again this past week and it does affect my hearing tests because I'll assume some beeps are the tinnitus, so I won't click the button, and I'd rather I get that wrong than falsely correct, so I played it safe.

Usually when I do the speech test, there is a mans voice playing from a CD, but the CD player was broken today, so my audiologist did the vocals. This may have biased my results because she's a female, she speaks clearer and I'm familiar with her voice. Even though, the automated male voice is also clear, and males are easier to understand than females, so it might just be that I'm familiar with her. Either way, I got 100% on the speech in quiet and 84% on speech in noise. That's pretty much a 25% improvement from three months ago.

The future speech tests will likely fluctuate in the top 80% due to the way I process speech. For instance, when I hear these sentences, I'm never hearing every single word correctly, but I manage to repeat back the correct sentence by assuming what the missing words were based on the sentence's proposition.
Example: "The girl went to the farm." I may hear 'the girl went to the arm,' but obviously that sounds wrong, so I manage to process that the last word was probably farm.
Otherwise, there's just some sentences where I can't make out half of the sentence and can't even take  wild guess what it was, and that's what gives me a score of 84%.

I mentioned that I felt I might've needed the high frequencies raised due to not being able to distinguish certain sounds yet. She mentioned it's pretty common and there's not really much more the CI can do for me at this point. If I'm not telling them apart, then I just gotta rely on sentence structures and lip reading, which I do anyway. She did try to raise the high frequencies though, but ended up reducing it by 2 points because it was just too intense at the level it was currently at. But she did raise the decibels for high frequencies... which I think she said means she raised the amount of firing the electrode will use to help me hear high frequencies, while at the same time, not raising the depth of the frequencies. Something like that. It's over my head.

So now I've got three settings on my CI: normal, tv, and noise. I hardly ever use the noise one because I'm not really in public much and when I am, the noise isn't bothering me to the point I consider switching modes. Although I should test it out more often because it might allow me to hear grocery clerks better than I do with it on normal. The tv option is so I can increase the CI volume without dealing with the intensity of the high frequencies. This is cause I consider my husband auditorily bipolar. Whereas I like the tv volume at 28, for the same show, he would like it at 38. But if we're watching a movie, I like the tv louder because the vocals are typically reduced for movies so to enhance action sounds, but he likes the tv lower than I do in those cases. So in cases like that, I can turn my CI volume up and hopefully hear more of the vocals. They also have the sounds set like that in theaters, which even with the CI is STILL annoying.

Quails and updates

Over all, my CI journey has reached a standstill. There will not be much else to say about it unless I'm a victim of malfunctioning or some random ailment as a result of the surgery or implant (which is all unlikely). Or perhaps if I get a new processor or get to participate in a study... or have a kid or find a job... all, which is unlikely for at least 2-4 years.

As I was pulling weeds in our backyard all week, I was hearing this whining sound that made me think of a dog that is crying. But it was tough to imagine there would actually be a crying dog outside nearly every single day, several hours a day. So when Thomas came out one day and I heard the sound again, I asked him what it was. He says it's a quail. Which is odd because I have yet to even see a quail out here... but for the time being, I guess quails sound like crying dogs. Sad.

I do have another CI mapping in a week; my first one in 3 months. Then I won't have another one until mid August, I think. My CI has absolutely had no "growth" towards hearing low pitch. Everyone told me it would eventually adjust, but it's not seeming that way. I think I once read that the electrodes often don't reach those very deep areas of the cochlea where low pitch nerves reside, so if that's the case, that might be way I'm not hearing any. The only burden is it's tough to actually hear most music the way it should sound. But then again, since my non-implanted ear pretty much only hears low pitch, I seem to have some balance in sounds between the two ears. The only singers I am able to enjoy these days it's people like Celine Dion, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. It's all about the vocals and who can carry some pitch. My past taste of alternative rock has gone out the door cause none it sounds the same anymore. Totally bummed.

On the other hand, my ability to grasp high frequencies is still a challenge. I've had one setting on my processor for 3 months now and I have not been able to increase the volume on it by any means... which would have allowed me to hear even more high frequency sounds. So I expect a 5 point increase in high frequencies on my mapping next week and nothing else. But maybe the preset volume is just too high? I'll have to mention it.

My speech comprehension should be better than it was three months ago, despite the lack of practice over the entire 7 months. I have not been able to find any pre-set sentence programs online to practice with, and my husband seems to just always be too busy with something to practice with me. But at the same time, when we practiced for 5 minutes a few weeks ago, I was bombing the word distinctions in a predictable way, likely due to the high frequency settings still being set on the low side, making it hard for me to tell apart similar sounds.

There's news going around that there is a new AB processor that has been developed and is being used (I think) in Europe. It's called Neptune and it's suppose to be small enough to be worn while swimming. Not that I'd ever care about wearing a hearing device while I'm underwater, but IT IS SMALLER! If it spreads to the United States, I might be able to upgrade to it in about 5 years... unless I wanna pay chunks of bucks for it out of my pocket (naw). But my ear will be so excited!