EEEs and MMMs

It's now the end of Week 1 with the CI. And I've survived my first week back at work without getting too stressed out.

I really did not have very high expectations for the short term. I was prepared to hear bleeps, pips and hoots but not to be able to make much sense out of it. That, apparently, is the experience of a lot of people for the first while.

In fact, the CI has exceeded expectations even within this first week. I'm hearing things but I'm also understanding people better. That's in combination with lip-reading and a hearing aid in my left hear - these seem to fill in the gaps that the CI is not, so far, able to comprehend.

Yesterday, I returned to Sunnybrook for a 'tune-up' session with the audiologist, Amy. I had a number of questions for her, one of which was whether all the electrodes in the implant were working correctly. For some recipients, not all electrodes are functional and not always for any identifiable reason. But Amy assured me that all the electrodes are working for me. That's a relief - it may not be too important in the end; all that matters is how much hearing and comprehension I'm getting out of the electrodes that are there. But it does mean that there's more of a reserve in case anything goes wrong with one or more of the electrodes in the future.

Initially, I had been set to a rather low level such that even with the volume control turned up to the max, it still was not very loud. Training wheels if you like. This time, Amy took me through a number of simple tests to find my comfort and tolerance level for individual pitches of sound. We then went through some listening exercises for various phonemes and I was able to distinguish most of them. The exception was /eee/ versus /mmm/. She says that a lot of CI users have trouble with this and nobody seems to know quite why. Fortunately, these two sounds are easily distinguished by lip-reading and are usually identifiable by context, in English at least.

The end result is that I now have a wider range of sounds: there's more mid-range so voices sound less thin and hissy than before. There's also a lot more volume so I'll have to be careful with the volume control! Even though it's tolerable at each separate pitch, when they are all put together the combination is going to be intolerable if the volume is set too high.

She also loaned me a workbook/CD set of listening exercises to do. This looks quite comprehensive and well thought out. I've never actually had anything like this before. It's too bad that hearing aid vendors don't provide something similar with their products. I'm sure it would help a lot of people adapt to hearing aids and (perhaps) prevent the aids from being relegated to the drawer.

So lots to work on. But I'm going X-C skiing tomorrow even though I'm not supposed to exercise for a month or so after the operation. I'll just take it very easy, not do anything that could be considered strenuous and listen for chickadees.