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

  At the end of May and into early June, a friend and I went to Tennessee and Kentucky to see the synchronous firefly display at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and we took a week to do it and drove around the area, staying at a restored Shaker village and at a wonderful B&B on Lookout Mountain above Chattanooga, among other places. And we went on a guided hike inside the park to see the fireflies.  This isn't just a few random fireflies flitting around your backyard, it's thousands of them, and they flash together - that's the "synchronous" part.  It's astounding, and it only happens at this one time of year - a mating ritual, and it's wonderful to see.  We met up with our group (ten or twelve people) and went to the park.  First the guides made a campfire and we all sat around snacking on the provided crackers, cheese and sausage and having S'mores.   And when it started getting towards dusk, we hiked up the mountain trail to a spot known to...

  Last week I received an email from the woman at the University that I've worked with on several studies regarding the interface between cochlear implants and their users.  She wanted to refer me to another team at the U - in a different department, but doing somewhat related work. So I said yes.  As I said to the team at the U today, I will always say yes, unless I absolutely cannot.  I'll go to the University, and I'll spend the time, because anything I can do to help make cochlear implants work better will be a tiny  - not a repayment, really, but a paying forward, for the incredibly beneficial impact these devices have had on my life.   So I drive to the University campus -- which is no longer a small thing - the best case is that the drive will be an hour and a half in each direction, and in this case, the team I was going to work with was in Elliot Hall, the Psych department, which doesn't have a parking lot.  I, a 1981 graduate of the Univ...

Since I received my cochlear implants, I've had no residual natural hearing.  I'm completely deaf, except that with my implants I hear better than I have in years. But I don't sleep with them, which is fine - I'm not usually talking to anyone while I'm asleep anyway (though my husband informs me that I was talking in my sleep the other night - first time that's happened, that I'm aware of). But in my dreams, I can hear.  I don't know if my brain thinks I can still hear unassisted or what, but it's kind of cool, it's the only time I can be like everyone else.  The fact that it's never when I'm conscious is unfortunate, but there we are.  I use my CIs and it's fine. But last night I had a dream in which, for the first time, I had cochlear implants.  In the dream, I didn't have my processors, though, and I could still hear, so if this is my brain adjusting to the reality of what happened eight years ago, it's doing it in an add a...

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...

  This may seem like something of a nothingburger to most people, but I just made a phone call. I've avoided the phone for most of the last twenty years.  The most frustrating moments in my life have been trying to hear and understand on the phone.  It affected me personally and professionally (I actually used to have people who worked for me come to my conference calls with me so we didn't miss anything).  Once I was on a call about a contract that directly affected my site, and the legal team was asking me questions about how to structure it and I couldn't participate in the call functionally.  I had to pass it off to my colleague from corporate sourcing - and then I hung up the phone and quietly lost my %$# for a few minutes.  I've had co-workers on calls with me, and when I was trying to schedule my CI surgery, I had our HR manager, who was a friend, on the call so I could hear. I LOATHE telephones. But I needed to make a call today.  We booked a t...

  Today was my second trip to the University of Minnesota campus in a week; today I went to the big medical center where the audiology clinic is and had a bunch of testing done to see if my hearing is still what it should be after the new processors. My last scheduled appointment was for early 2020, and never occurred because of Covid lockdown.  I just never got around to scheduling another appointment, because everything seemed to be working. Then I submitted my request for an upgrade, and the insurance people insisted that I see my audiologist, and when I was in to see her about the upgrade she suggested that about a month after I received and started using my new processors I should go in for a round of testing. So I did, and it was fine - the results were comparable to late 2019, and as noted in the title up above, the audiologist said I really should come in at least every other year. So I will.  And maybe in two years some of the road construction will be finished. ...

  Here I am again - seems like this is my CI summer.  Today I drove into Minneapolis again - I got an email from K at the university, where they're doing studies to learn more about how cochlear implant recipients hear and understand with their devices.  Basically, it's the interface between the implant and the, er, wetware inside the head. Although it was a bit last-minute, I thought, well, why not?  I'm retired and don't have a schedule to speak of.  The only accommodation needed was for us to do our Costco run to St. Cloud yesterday so I could go to the U today.  And the only real drawback was that summertime in Minnesota is when they do highway construction.  Lots and lots of highway construction.  In the area around Shevlin Hall (where the hearing labs are) there are two roads closed for construction, overburdening University Ave, Washington Ave, and Oak St., which are all main arteries on campus.  So I tried to avoid it by going around....

  So as noted, I received new processors a couple of weeks ago.  I've been slowly learning what all they can do (other than sound better) and today I decided to test out the connectivity features. The processors themselves have Bluetooth, so depending on the device I can pair directly and have the sound delivered wirelessly.  I know that Bluetooth isn't new technology, but it's new in my processors, and it's exceedingly cool. First I paired them to my phone.  I have Audible on my phone - I'm not wild about listening to books rather than reading them, but I did it as part of my rehab when I was first implanted, and I kept the app (though I don't subscribe - Audible does too much without telling me, which I don't care for).  But I opened up one of the books that I already had and listened for a bit, and it's incredibly clear and easy to hear!  Maybe I'll consider audiobooks on planes?  Possible.  Though books are portable too. Then I tried to pair t...

  Relying on technology to hear means that though you get current and top of the line equipment, research continues and new models get released and before you know it, your cool new tech is old. I had a version of that going on when I was using hearing aids too - I'd get new ones on average every five years, and every time I did I was amazed at how much better they were - and it was a good think too, because my hearing was degrading.  For a while it felt as though they kept up with better performance, but then of course they didn't, and I ended up getting implanted. And if I'm honest, my processors have been wonderful, they gave me better hearing than I ever though I'd have again.  They sounded good - I listen to music whenever I'm in the car (well, mostly when I'm in the car alone), and they're reliable.  I was provided with all kinds of replacement parts in case I needed them, and the only things I've had to buy were filter covers (for the air filters ...

  Last year I drove into the city a couple of times to participate in some studies being done at the University of Minnesota that were designed to help the researchers understand how people with hearing impairments - and specifically, cochlear implant recipients - fill in the blanks, so to speak, when the speech they're hearing isn't understandable. Knowing how we can successfully fill in those blanks better from context could lead to the development of ways to help CI users develop that ability.   Today I received an email from the audiologist that I worked with in the study, and she sent me a link to the paper that they published.  I'll admit that so far I've just skimmed it but just receiving it, knowing that this study, this learning, could result in better speech comprehension results for people with CIs is just wonderful.  I've been lucky enough to participate in studies to improve cochlear implants themselves, at the MedEl offices in North Carolina, and now h...

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...

  After our success in attending live theater in February, we decided to give a movie a try.  An actual movie in an actual theater.  My husband wanted to see "Oppenheimer" so he asked if I wanted to go.  Sure, I said, but let's go to that theater in Waconia that has captioning.  I know I'll miss things if there's no captioning. So we went online and bought tickets (it's also one of those theaters with recliners rather than tiny little theater seats, which was quite nice, though not nearly as comfortable as the recliner in our sectional at home).   Then we drove an hour.  See, we live outside a small town.  There are two theaters in town, but neither has captions (according to the websites, anyway, and I think if they had it they'd say so).  So we drove to a town that's an hour from home, but is increasingly becoming less of a town and more of an outer-ring suburb of Minneapolis. When we arrived I asked about the captioning, and it appear...

  Some time ago I posted about hearing - or apparently hearing - sounds that were familiar from before I lost my hearing.  My brain was more of less filling in the blanks, and letting me hear things like the sound of the shower water, or my hairdryer, or the coffee canister plopping down on top of the tea canister: https://hearinglisten.blogspot.com/2021/01/your-brain-on-nothing-at-all.html Ah, there, so it appears that I posted that in 2021.  Two years on, I'm taking another shower (not to worry, there were a few in between as well) and I noticed that it's not happening anymore.  No more rushing water in the shower courtesy of my hardworking brain, no more banging cabinet doors. I know sometimes when things are making noise but it tends to be when there's associated physical bangs, or vibrations like the sonic toothbrush makes, but mostly, my brain has noped out of the business of trying to make me feel normal, just like my ears had already done. It's not surprising...

Today I had to make two phone calls.   That quite literally stresses me out more than anything else.  In the last few months I've been working on winding up my late father's estate; I was planning to retire but then was laid off so retirement came two months early (this does not affect me financially, we're fine) and then, of course, as I'm not employed anymore and am turning 65 in May, I've had to enroll in Medicare and my husband had to enroll in both Medicare and Social Security. Of all of that, the worst part was having to talk on the phone.  For most of the last twenty years I've been unable to hear people speak on the phone and trying to do so is an exercise in the most extreme frustration I've experienced - except, of course, I've experienced it over and over and over until at this point I have a loathing of talking on the phone that psychologically I cannot get past. At work, I was participating in Teams meetings extremely successfully.  I had co...

  We used to do things.  Go to concerts, plays, movies.  Slowly, though, we stopped doing it because I couldn't hear anything.  I last saw a play in 1999 (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Guthrie, excellent production with Patrick Stewart and Mercedes Ruehl, at least as far as I could tell, having missed at least half the dialogue), and have, in the period since 1999 seen two movies in theaters - The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers in 2002 (which I didn't need to hear to know what was going on having read the books several times) and then Gravity in 2013, which actually didn't rely on its dialogue either, you could watch the picture and not hear it and follow the story (presuming you'd left your logic and anything you knew about science at the door). But that's it.  For the last 25 years almost all of our entertainment took place at home, where I could turn on the captions. Now I can hear much better, with my CIs, but we've never tried a live performa...

  The other day an online friend posted this and tagged me: And of course it resonated.  I responded:  " Yep. Screaming babies on planes, stupid people bellowing into cell phones, it all goes away. Silence can be a refuge." And as my late friend and CI sister used to say, being able to turn it off is my superpower!  And it does feel like that.   Today is laundry day at my house, and my husband wanted me to wash his work jacket - one of those yellowish ones that you see at Fleet Farm and Menards.  So I did, and popped it in the dryer, and holy moly.  It was BANGING on the sides of the dryer.  We realized that it was the little plastic knob thingies on the hood cord ends, and took them off, and that made it a bit quieter, but the weight of the jacket was such that it thudded against the dryer drum every second or so. After a while it started to feel as though someone were pounding on my head rather than just a jacket hitting the dryer wall, and I ...

  You know, a lot of people like to complain about the internet, and especially social media, and there's certainly a lot to complain about.  But there are some things that it provides that we never had before, and one of those things is our ability to interact with people that we would never otherwise meet. Years ago a friend tipped me off that there was a blog she was having fun with.  It was a woman in Canada who wrote the blog as though her cat was writing it, and if you kept up with it long enough you would swear that you'd come to know Mojo and could recognize his "voice" from his blog.  As time went on several of us began to participate in the comments in the voice of our own cats (and in one case, a dog, and some bugs).  It became a sort of social media for cats, and it just worked.  Sure, it was silly, but it was fun, and we more or less got to know each other that way. Then back in 2018 I learned that I was a candidate for cochlear implants, and o...

This morning I woke up when my alarm buzzer went off.  This is unusual because:  1. It was an hour earlier than I'd actually set the alarm for  2. I nearly hit the ceiling - my heart was racing, I was breathing fast  3. But mostly?  I CAN'T HEAR THE ALARM.   In fact, I've never heard it, don't have any idea what it sounds like.  If it goes off when my husband is home, he wakes me up when he hears it.  If he's not home I use the shaker and it shakes me awake. I'm pretty sure that I dreamed that I woke up to the sound of my alarm, and the alarm in the dream really woke me up.  It was bizarre.