2 days post switch-on
It's now been two days since the implant was switched on.
It's certainly been a challenging and frustrating couple of days but I'm certainly making some progress. I'm torn between my audiology brain telling me to be patient and that it will take many months before I'll get the full benefit of the implant and my personal feelings of frustration and impatience.
As I wear a hearing aid in my other ear which gives me lots of sound it's easy for my implanted ear to switch off and I notice a difference between how the implant sounds with and without the hearing aid. When I'm wearing it with my hearing aid the beeping is neverending and I can't tell any detail between them - it's just pure tones one after another. However, when I really try and listen with the implant alone I'm starting to pick out some real differences. Instead of just beep beep beep it's more like buzz buzz buzz... Whilst I'm sure that seems underwhelming it's definitely progress and I'm even starting to be able to discriminate between the buzz sounds too. They don't yet sound like speech sounds but the fact they are sounding a bit different is positive. I've been trying to watch TV with subtitles with the implant alone - it works quite well and I can follow the pattern of speech well until they introduce background music and it all goes to pot! Any suggestions for things I can watch without music in the background would be much appreciated. Unfortunately the subtitles on the news are so far behind they're not much help!
I've been doing some other listening practice this afternoon:
My parter reads out the colours behind a sheet of paper and I repeat them back. I'm still some way off being able to get them all right but I was amazed at the ones I was able to get so it's provided a much-needed morale boost and I was definitely getting better towards the end. I really struggled with 'purple' - no matter how many times I found it so difficult to distinguish it from the others.
This kind of practice is really tiring and I'm trying not to overdo it and reward myself afterwards. This is with chocolate at the moment - and given I think I've worked really hard I have eaten a lot of chocolate over the last 48 hours!
I'm back in work on Monday and I'm sure that will bring a whole new set of challenges so it will be interesting to see how that goes.
In general I'm feeling much better in myself and I tried a short drive yesterday which was ok. Sleep is still proving elusive and the tinnitus has been raging since the implant has been switched on so I'm still working on that one. I know all of this is normal and with patience it will slowly improve so I'm trying not to dwell too much on it.
