Ramblings
Twice in the last two weeks I've had people ask me about my CIs - how are they different from hearing aids and how do they work. It's happened before, but not all that frequently, but I suspect that as they get a bit more common, people become curious and wonder what the deal is. So I explain, in fairly general terms, how the implant is surgically installed in our heads, and then in even more general terms, now the electronic signal goes from the microphones on the speech processors in to the auditory nerve and what a revelation it is when it turns out to work, and you find that you can hear better than you expected to ever hear again. Within the restraints of how much time we have, of course - one of these people was a young woman working checkout at the supermarket (and no, there wasn't anyone behind me) and the other was a guy who runs a nice cafe we sometimes go to in our county town. It's fun for me - I like talking about this and what a great thing it is, a...