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

Six years into this whole CI thing, I find that I have far less that prompts me to come here and ramble on.  My CIs have just become a fact of life, something that I'm used to and rely on but don't necessarily go around reacting to everything as though it's new, because, hey, it's been six years.  It's not new. But sitting there listening to the odd noises that my husband is making in the kitchen (seriously, you don't want to know), it occurs to me that a part of this journey that's still active is learning what justifies getting up and running to make sure he's not unconscious or sitting in there with the components of half our dishes on the floor. I just don't have the judgment about sounds that hearing people do. Things that sound alarming to me just generate a "nothing, I just bumped a pan on the stove" or "what, I'm just talking to myself" from my husband.  Which may or may not be normal behavior - I don't know.  I kn...

  I had another opportunity to participate in research that should help improve understanding of how people with cochlear implants hear.  Not the mechanics - that's well understood, at least by the manufacturers, but how the brain interacts with the device. This time it wasn't MedEl's research team, though, it was at the University of Minnesota's Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Services.  It was just two and a half hours or so, listening to speech with varying clarity and responding, while a camera recorded the changing dilation of my eyes, which is correlated with how difficult it is to hear and understand - when you focus and try to hear, your eyes dilate. It didn't take all that long, and I don't mind going to the University campus at all.  I was an undergraduate there, all those years ago, and I love the campus, and I like the atmosphere at a university, all the young people having some of the best years of their lives.   And then we had an e...

  Well, not really.  I don't sing much, I am almost certain that when I do I'm not in tune, and I don't need to inflict that on other people.  But I do listen, and I sing along in my head. As Bruce Springsteen said, the best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.  In my case, what I'm facing is walking for anything from 60 minutes to 80 minutes a day - I have to do weight-bearing exercise to keep my bone density up.  And since I have no wish whatsoever to spend my old age being carried around in a bucket (OK, this is me we're talking about, it would probably be a 55-gallon drum and a forklift), I do the exercise.  It works, too, I had a bone density scan a couple of weeks ago any the density is better than my last scan. But man, does it help to have music to listen to, so I have an mp3 player that I usually connect to my CI processors via a neckloop - it connects to the mp3 player via Bluetooth and to my processors via t...