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 it much, but I'd noticed that I could hear the hair dryer and the shower but not, oddly, any actual speech, if I didn't have my processors on.  Why could I hear the hairdryer and the shower and not my husband? - this doesn't make sense.

But recently I was in the bathroom one morning getting ready for work and got a little weirded out because the shower curtain was blowing and billowing as though it was windy, which it's definitely not in a small internal room without even a window.  I finally looked down and realized that when I got my hairdryer out of the drawer and put it on the vanity top I must have accidentally turned it on, and it was blowing the shower curtain.

But I didn't hear it.

So I began to realize that I never had heard any of those things since I was implanted, but because I was standing under the shower with water falling on me, and my brain knows that that sounds like, it was filling in the silence with the sound that it knows should be there.  It's an odd realization, but I've asked a couple of people in my online CI user group and it's not uncommon for those whose hearing loss was progressive so we have strong memories of what things used to sound like.

The human brain is pretty amazing.

I just ordered a second sonic alarm clock (it has a little hockey puck shaped thing that you put under the mattress.  I've had one for a while but it's been in the dressing room, a little room next to our bedroom where we have overflow clothing storage (two dressers!) and a daybed.  I'd been sleeping in there when I was here and my husband hadn't yet moved from our old house, so I used that to make sure I woke up.  Usually when we're both here (mostly, because he's here, as is our bedroom set) I just set a regular alarm and though it doesn't wake me up with its buzzer, it wakes him and he wakes me.  It doesn't happen often - at least 95% of the time I wake up before the alarm goes off and he's not bothered.  But he's been staying in the old house a couple of days a week working there lately, and I slept in the dressing room, where my sonic alarm clock is.

Well, this bothered our cat like you wouldn't believe.  She always used to have other cats to curl up with when she sleeps, but they were old and have died, so she's the only one now.  And we are her sleeping buddies now.  She's insistent that at least one of us has to be down there for her to snuggle with by 10:30 or so, and we (as the meme I saw online recently had it) two grown-ass adults, are obedient to our 10-pound cat and go to bed.

Well, I have to get up in the morning anyway.  But she was really bothered so I ordered another sonic clock for the bedroom and we'll be able to sleep there when the husband's away.  Not that the cat couldn't have joined me in the dressing room, but she didn't, so we're doing it this way.

But I can't wait to see how my husband reacts to the shaker.  I suspect he'll have to be peeled off the ceiling.