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.