5 days post switch-on. Back to work....
I've been back in work two days now. I'm lucky that as an audiologist everyone around me is very understanding and I've been given a relatively gentle first couple of days back.
Despite this, it's been a long couple of days. The implant is still making it more difficult to hear with my hearing aid and back in real life where you really need to be able to hear this becomes much more challenging than being in my comfort zone at home. I'm finding that simple tasks are much more arduous and I generally feel like I'm walking round with a head full of cotton wool.
To put it mildly - I'm grumpy! I'm finding the implant only time that I have at the end of the day harder work. Over the weekend I made lots of progress and that's certainly slowed down significantly now I've not been able to dedicate good quality (wide-awake) time to listening with the implant.
So how's it sounding at the moment?
The beep beep beeps remain! Maybe I'll miss them when they've gone?! They are mainly there when my hearing aid is turned on and I think my brain is trying to ignore the implant. Like I said in the last post, with my hearing aid out and listening with just the implant I can definitely hear more detail although it's not really speech-like for me at the moment. It feels a bit like I'm trying to learn a whole new language (and I was always terrible at languages) so the number 'one' is 'buzz-beep' and 'two' is 'beep beep' and I have to try and remember which sound is for which number/word and I'm pretty rubbish at this so far.
My partner has likened me to Antonio Banderas in the campfire scene of 13th Warrior....
I'm still a way off Antonio Banderas level yet though!
Lots of people have asked me whether it's what I expected, or seem surprised that it’s different. I think I've learnt that it's so hard to predict how the implant will be like for anybody. Everyone's experiences are so variable and I'm sure your own personality also has a big part to play - I didn't realise that beeeeeeeeppss would be so irritating to me! Some people can discriminate some speech by this point following their 'switch-on' but for others it takes much longer. My auditory nerve in my left ear has been fairly dormant for quite a few years so it's actually pretty amazing that five days after 'switch-on' it's already doing so much and it's easy to lose sight of this.
Tomorrow I have another appointment where I'm hoping we can make some changes to the map of the implant and it will be interesting to see what I notice after that mapping session and how things change over the next few days.
