two steps forward, one back
I've been struggling a bit with the sound in my second CI; on the 16th I had an audiology appointment and we made some changes to the map on the right CI to try to reduce the echo, but didn't change the one on the left because it was sounding pretty good.
Two days later the tinniness increased exponentially. It was ugly, to the point of distorting the sound I was hearing. Since we didn't remap that processor, I know it wasn't the CI (also, I was experiencing the same problem with both my Sonnet and Rondo2 processors, so this was clearly something that I had to rehab my way out of).
So for the last week and a half I just kept on with the rehab on the left. The tinniness is finally abating a bit - which of course just means that now the echo on the right is prominent again. Sweet.
But I was talking to a friend this weekend who is having some issued with hearing loss and made the comment that I've been trying to keep my social media posts and my blog posts upbeat, despite the ups and downs of the CI rehab process.
And then I realized that I shouldn't do that. If this is to be a record of my CI journey it needs to reflect the challenges as well as the good days, or it loses what we used to call on Usenet truthiness.
Because this process is not easy, and it's not just one improvement after another. It's a lot of rehab and it encompasses both drastic improvements and occasional losses of clarity, and it would be a disservice to both the experience and to anyone reading this (hi to all three of you!) to pretend otherwise.
And the occasional setbacks make the improvements that much sweeter. It's not easy. But that doesn't mean that it's not working, and it doesn't mean that it's not better than what I was living with prior to implantation for the last several years.
It is. It's far better. Even with the distortion and tinniness for the last couple of weeks, it's much, much better than hearing noise and being unable to comprehend, or not hearing at all, and the resulting isolation and withdrawal.
Over time this is getting better, but make no mistake, from the very beginning it was better than before.
Two days later the tinniness increased exponentially. It was ugly, to the point of distorting the sound I was hearing. Since we didn't remap that processor, I know it wasn't the CI (also, I was experiencing the same problem with both my Sonnet and Rondo2 processors, so this was clearly something that I had to rehab my way out of).
So for the last week and a half I just kept on with the rehab on the left. The tinniness is finally abating a bit - which of course just means that now the echo on the right is prominent again. Sweet.
But I was talking to a friend this weekend who is having some issued with hearing loss and made the comment that I've been trying to keep my social media posts and my blog posts upbeat, despite the ups and downs of the CI rehab process.
And then I realized that I shouldn't do that. If this is to be a record of my CI journey it needs to reflect the challenges as well as the good days, or it loses what we used to call on Usenet truthiness.
Because this process is not easy, and it's not just one improvement after another. It's a lot of rehab and it encompasses both drastic improvements and occasional losses of clarity, and it would be a disservice to both the experience and to anyone reading this (hi to all three of you!) to pretend otherwise.
And the occasional setbacks make the improvements that much sweeter. It's not easy. But that doesn't mean that it's not working, and it doesn't mean that it's not better than what I was living with prior to implantation for the last several years.
It is. It's far better. Even with the distortion and tinniness for the last couple of weeks, it's much, much better than hearing noise and being unable to comprehend, or not hearing at all, and the resulting isolation and withdrawal.
Over time this is getting better, but make no mistake, from the very beginning it was better than before.
It wouldn't be a story if it didn't have adversity.
ReplyDeleteDo you do requests? If so, I'd like to read a post on what rehab entails. I've seen plenty of that for things like knees and ligaments, but never for what you're doing.