Nine month review
Wearing the implant has now become normal for me. I put it on at the start of the day and wear it all day apart from bath, shower and bed. I forget that I'm wearing it most of the time and it's just become part of everyday life. This is great but it does mean that it can be hard to measure the impact that it's having as I now take it for granted.
It's also easy to notice the things that don't sound so great - I still can't get my head around how music sounds with an implant. I can identify songs now but it still sounds very odd to me. Hearing in noisy places also remains challenging and can be frustrating.
So when I went for my 9 month review to see how I'd settled in with the implant I was rather sceptical about exactly what benefit they would be able to measure. As I work in Audiology it's been difficult to find some good tests to use to measure my progress as I'm so familiar with a lot of test material. We have managed to find some that are a bit obscure that we have used through this process. It's for that reason that the scores I'm about to report can't really be used to compare my progress with anybody else who has had an implant but rather a comparison just between my progress a few months ago and now.
Drum roll.....
At my 3 month review I scored 43% in identifying sentences correctly without any lip pattern using my implant alone.
At my 9 month review I scored 83%!!!!
For me this was completely unexpected. I genuinely found it difficult to notice the changes in my listening between 3 months and 9 months but the difference in these scores is pretty staggering. It just shows how wearing the implant full time in lots of different situations your brain is learning all the time and gradually acclimatising to the implant. I now wonder how I managed without it!
