Bionic Travels: Mapping #3

The noisy world is getting noisier.  Those around me are growing happier.  I am feeling freer.  The cochlear implant bill was $97,422.14.  A small price to pay for a freer, happier, nosier world??   Time will tell once the insurance company decides that they actually DID give pre approval for this procedure which they apparently  have ‘forgotten’ at this point.  Don’t get me started on health care….

That aside. This device is starting to work the miracles I was promised. It’s been fast for me because I had hearing up until surgery. Not much, but enough that I knew what voices sounded like even though I could no longer discern words very well.  Three weeks past activation, I’m understanding more than I have in YEARS!  It’s truly remarkable.  I focus mostly on voices because I could have lived without the newly noticed squeaky windshield wipers and the sounds of emptying water from the clothes washer which sounds as if it is flooding the house… Those would NOT have been worth $97,422.14. Relationships are.

Dave offered a profound insight the other day. For a long time he has been consciously and subconsciously making a choice every time he wanted to say something to me:  “Should I bother with this comment or thought? Is it worth repeating until she gets it?”  As an extrovert, he determined that is a good question to ask oneself all the time, regardless; but when it becomes necessary to calculate every word with one’s wife, that’s just a drag.  His impatience was leaking out though he really tried to seal the gaps. I did the best I could, but it was still hard. 

Many moons ago (four years ago when I first became a CI candidate) my audi said many a relationship has been rescued from the brink of despair by the hearing impaired person getting a CI.  I hear that.  (Pun intended and edited IN.) We were not near any brink, but it was a drag--on Dave, on the kids, on my friends, on my extended family, on anyone who had the audacity to try to telephone me, on the clerk at the ice cream store… Hard.  BUT NOT NOW.  At some point every day, someone close to me says the following (insert gleeful expressions) “You can hear me!!!” “I’m talking in a normal voice.”  “You heard that and I wasn’t looking at you!”

The clerks, mumbling into their cash registers, still get a blank stare from me, but I am actually feeling more confident to go out shopping without an interpreter. I’m a confident and active person so this was weird, but true.  I was tired of telling people with my clear, well articulated speech “I am functionally deaf, could you please speak more slowly. No, you don’t need to speak more loudly, but I have to figure out what you are saying blah, blah, blah…” I am feeling more free… like I could walk into a store all by fifty-something self and make a purchase without confusion!

And then there are restaurants.  I’ve avoided them since surgery July 8, but delivering our son to college last week I needed to eat and therefore had to venture into those noisy, scary places.  Chipotle?!  They obviously have no clue that hearing impaired people exist!!!  Or, if they do, they haven’t any interest in our cash! Line an entire restaurant in METAL?!  HA!!!  Our lunchtime foray into this bastion of college student feeding does not count on the “I could actually hear the waitress say something!” scale of small miracles.  But, the first night, I actually DID hear the waitress say something!  The next morning the timid waiter wasn’t really awake because I had to ask my Oh So Patient College Sophomore Son to interpret for me.  But, one out of three isn’t bad!

If you’re what I affectionately call a ‘quantoid’, you will be more fascinated with the following stats. These are oft rattled off by the CI wearing set, though I’m still behind the curve. When we get our hearing tested we get scored as far as how many words we can recognize, how loud frequencies are, if we can repeat a sentence and have it make sense… stuff like that.  My Ph.D. clad audiologist has been outstanding during this initial mapping phase. While I prefer warm and fuzzy health care providers and she’s not high on the W/F (Warm/Fuzzy) scale, I can tell SHE’S GOOD. She is listening really well to me and paying attention to a gazillion details. I am truly amazed at how she can tweak this CI to fit my needs in all sorts of cosmic dimensions. This time she put me back in THE BOOTH.  (The booth makes us cry and toss up our heads and hands in frustration as it confirms what we know to be terribly true already: we cannot hear.) Anyway, it’s standard procedure to put us in the booth to become qualified as a CI candidate to quantitatively confirm just how bad our hearing really is. I understood ZERO words with no hearing aids and about 4-14% with them. That’s not real conducive to easy living in the hearing world with only a first graders’ vocabulary of sign language. With the CI, three weeks after activation, I scored 64% of word recognition for words spoken in quiet with no context.  Add context with sentences and I got 100%. Stunning. I’ve been told that with practice (not really into that yet), I can reach around 90%.

I think maybe possibly I’m a believer.  Bring on the words.