your brain on nothing at all
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