I was doing science!

 This week I had the chance to visit the U.S. office of the company that makes my cochlear implants.  The company's headquarters are in Austria, but the have an office here and one of the groups in the office is a research & development group - small, just four people (really, really smart people) who work on ways to improve hearing for their customers.  

And the way they do that is by having people who are implanted come in and do a week of tests.  The tests aren't diagnostic, but the responses of the subjects provide that data that will either support the hypothesis being tested (preferred) or not (but even then they generally learn things).

I volunteered to do this in 2020 and was scheduled to go there in March.  Yep, that March, when the first round of COVID shutdowns occurred.  Cancellation.  I was disappointed, but didn't actually feel the need to expose myself to more Covid than necessary - keep in mind this was well before the vaccine was released.  A year later we rescheduled, and yep.  The Delta variant put it on hold again.  This year I got an email from the audiologist who's part of the R&D team that said they'd received approval to start up again, and did I want to come in three weeks?

Of course I did.  

I talked to my husband and my boss (me: how do you feel about short notice vacation?  Bob:  I love it, I do it all the time) and as I expected both were OK with me taking a week off.  My husband would have been able to come but he was pretty busy working on our old house (actually, as it turned out he was busy straining his back, but it's better to be home with that too).

So last Friday I packed my things, got in my car and went southeast.  It's a 20-hour drive (at best) so I wanted to get at least a few hours in on Friday to make Saturday and Sunday shorter drives.  It actually worked out fairly well, I enjoyed the drive (guess who hasn't gone anywhere since Covid) and went to the corporate office at 9:00 on Monday.  Also Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.  And all day every day I was plugged into various programs that had me listening to and reacting to various iterations of different sounds.

Sounds dull, yes?  It is.  It was strange, because it was both fairly tedious and one of the coolest things ever.  Here's the thing:  these cochlear implants have, as any anyone who's been reading my blog knows (hi, everyone!  All two of you) given me more quality of life than I've had in at least fifteen years.  Probably twenty.  Hearing matters, you know?  Even little things like the running dialogue I had with the staff at the hotel breakfast room all week - those are things that never, ever happened to me.  I tried to be polite, but mostly I nodded and just hoped to hell I wasn't agreeing to something hideous.

And this company did that, they made a product that lets me hear again.  And these people are working on making it better - always looking at ways to make hearing with cochlear implants be more like hearing with ears.  And they're passionate about it, and it shows in everything they do.

I can't talk about much of the detail that I learned about because it's still experimental - if it becomes part of the product then it will become public, but currently it's still confidential and covered by the nondisclosure agreement that I signed.

But it was incredibly gratifying to be part of testing those new ideas, and it was a privilege to be included.  I hope to be able to go again after this round of testing, because even if it doesn't directly benefit me (though it's likely to) it's just amazing to be part of developing this technology, which is already astounding and gives people like me their lives back.

Dear MedEl:  thank you, thank you, thank you.

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