Listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door, let's go

  I have a strange question.  My husband collects model trains, and he recently bought a set of boxcars from Germany with chewing-gum logos on the sides.  And they arrived packed with actual gum. Now, I don't normally chew gum, but I do like mints after coffee, and this is spearmint, so I thought what the heck, ought to work.  But although the mint part works, this is quite annoying.  I mean to say, do people with normal hearing actually hear the gum squeak against their teeth?  Because if so, how does it not drive you crazy? Back to Tic-Tacs for me.

  When I was implanted, I received my first CI in my worst ear - my right ear hadn't heard much at all for years.  I did have a hearing aid in it, but mostly that served to bring my sounds from the right side of me (my hearing aids talked to each other, as though there was a little wifi bubble around my head).  But there really wasn't anything there. When I had my second surgery, we were implanting the ear with all of my residual natural hearing.  This worried me a bit, as my friends who've been reading this for some time will recall (and that is putting it mildly, as they'll also recall).  But I was hearing so much better with the CI that I realized, finally, that my residual natural hearing wasn't worth worrying about.  The surgeon told me that there was a 50/50 chance that I'd lose what hearing I had in that ear when we implanted it, and I figured, yeah, OK.  I'm not losing much. Afterward I was focused on rehab for a long time, and didn't think about