Bionic Travels: Mapping #2

For CI users, one week after CI activation and learning to live with strange devices attached to one’s head and listening to noises migrating from The Matrix to one’s immediate world, it’s time for Mapping #2. This is when the audi connects the CI up to the computer and proceeds to cheerfully inflict further auditory torture.  (ok, it wasn’t THAT bad…)

Before I tell you about today’s travels on the Auditory Thruway, two important things: 

Costco is 45 minutes away from where I live, but only 10 minutes away from the doctor’s office. At Costco we belatedly learned that we can save hundreds of $$ on some needed meds, so we joined. After Mapping #2, I went to Costco. With my CI on.  No small miracle. And, I discovered this awesome 65% dark chocolate bark with nuts and pumpkin seeds… but I digress.

Secondly, my new dress matched the Haiku handbag I found at the thrift shop in Seattle and carried today. With this CI, I am now entering my ‘handbag phase of life.’ I slid through my ‘shoe phase’ a few years ago with only a few residual issues. Now that I have loads of sensory crap paraphernalia to carry, handbags are di rigueur pour moi!  I have been given permission to get all the handbags I want! Fortunately, my ‘want’ list consists of cool handmade bags that I find at craft fairs or make myself.  If it’s mentioned in the NYT or Oprah, I do not want it, thank you very much.

What happened at Mapping #2? 

I got an “A.” OK, I’m extrapolating from what she said, but in some fashion, completely beyond my comprehension, I am ‘about two weeks ahead of many other CI users’ right now. Seriously.  Beats me how or why. I am just saying what I hear and doing my best to deal with all the strangeness of living in the Auditory Matrix. My audi increased the sound loudness, added back in a frequency she deleted last week (so I now have 22 electronic frequencies playing in my head), expanded the distance of sound that will come in and gave me a program for ‘noise’ and the rest for ‘everyday.’ In two weeks I can add ‘music’ and hopefully ‘metaphysical ancestral communication.’  (She is really, really good!) I need to be less scared of my fancy remote CI controller and act cool while using it to switch between programs. 

My ear is still tender and apparently some of my stitches are being stubborn and not dissolving, so that’s making a couple of sore spots on my head. Moleskin to the rescue--adhered to the processor on my ear. The rechargeable batteries make it a bit heavy, but I will continue to adjust to all of this and heal from surgery.  After CI surgery, our tongues are affected because tongue nerves are in the same spot and are often damaged or cut.  My tongue is ‘off,’ but I’m not sure it’s ‘off’ quite enough to help me lose these stubborn ten pounds. I digressed with comments about dark chocolate bark and mentioned losing ten pounds in the same essay. No need to point that out, thanks.  

For those of you trying to figure out what I might possibly be hearing, today’s Helpful Analogy is to imagine the way sound comes when you yell through a fan! Don’t tell me you didn’t yell through a fan when you were a kid! If, per chance you have never done so, go buy a fan, plug it in and yell into it, posthaste!!  If you are cheap, just find a demo on at Lowe’s and start yelling!!! You’ll immediately have a sense of my new world.  All you have to do is separate the 230 nuances of sound your natural ear picks up and then distorts. Reduce that to 22 electronic pulses and voila! you will know what my Auditory Matrix sounds like today.  If that Helpful Analogy doesn’t work, there is the image of sound rushing through a window screen only to be swooshed away into the atmosphere by fierce winds swirling up to cavort in the treetops. The fan is better?  I thought so.

I haven’t heard enough voices today to know whether or not the soprano robots are now altos, or if the chipmunks are going through puberty with squeaky voices changing to baritone.  I did suggest some of the lower frequencies be increased on my ‘map.’ We’ll see what that does to my ability to discern words.

I’m not real good in the quantitative department when MATH and PERCENTAGES and NUMBERS are involved.  A lot of CI users would have filled this post with the % of words they recognized today over last week, or the % of hearing increase from the paltry 4-12% of word recognition I had before this CI.  Actually, my audi didn’t even give me any sentences or words today. I guess that’s sort of standard procedure, but I don’t have any numbers to share. I decided I got an “A” anyway. I go back in two weeks for Mapping #3. Between now and then, I will be cranking up the volume as much as I can handle and noticing all the environmental sounds that have long been lost to my perception. Thanks for traveling beside me on the Auditory Thruway.  Stay tuned…