Bionic Travels: Personalized Programming

My VERY EXPENSIVE implant comes with a fancy remote control.  Our audiologists program these remotes so we can tune our CIs to the current hearing situation. The standard programs work well, but I thought they were a little boring: Everyday. Noise. Focus. Music.

My last blog post mentions that my audi is a little low on the W/F scale, so I was hesitant to present to her the list of the programs I NEED to hear in my life situations. If I am going to be BIONIC, then my programs need to reflect this. How is “Everyday” bionic, I ask? 

I have previously mentioned that I was hoping for the Metaphysical Ancestral Communication program. In particular, I would like to say “Hi” to my mom, happily residing at Table with friends and family in heaven. She knew I was heading in the CI direction and it was she who ‘offered’ me this opportunity through our shared genes. But, alas, my audi denied me this program.  I must ask Jesus to say “Hi” to her for me. That works, but I was hoping for a more direct line.

I love being outdoors and I figured The Earth Goddess program would enable me to hear the grass grow. I’d also enjoy personalized weather reports, a mosquito alert system, and automatic birdcall recognition. But again--denied.

Keeping is simple, I thought the Simultaneous Translation program would be easily accessed.  I want to visit my cousins in Hungary, so Hungarian is on my list since it’s such a difficult language.  Why not just add Romanian, Icelandic and French? How hard can it BE??  

My idea of Bionic encompasses all those things plus the ability to chat with the fairies who will soon be visiting all the little ceramic houses I have been making for them.  The Celtic Fairie program would cover that.  And, the Narnian Animal Language program?  Perfect for telling our resident deer family that, while they are cute and generally behave politely, the late night Tulip Tasting Sessions need to end. The Narnian Owls and their awesome hearing abilities are close by. I know they are. If only I could reach out to them….

Boldly I showed my audi my list.  She said with a grin, “I’ll pass this onto Cochlear and see what they can do.”  That means all I can do it wait and be content with Everyday. Noise. Focus. Music.  Stay tuned….

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.  

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…