Firstly, an apology for being very slow in updating the blog—it has been quite a few days!
My switch-on was scheduled for 1.30 on the 19th September so my wife and I travelled down from Buckinghamshire at lunchtime to give us plenty of time. After braving the tube and a little walk in the rain we arrived at the hospital and went through to my appointment. Unfortunately, the actual sound processor I was going to have hadn’t arrived from the manufacturer (Advanced Bionics) yet, but they had another one (same make and model) that I could use in the meantime. The only difference was that it was not the colour I had asked for… not that that really matters to me! 😉
The first step was to fit the processor which was connected to the computer. The electrodes were tested and I heard a variety of beep sounds at different pitches from quite low to quite high. There are 20 electrodes in all and the audiologist was testing a few at a time so this was fairly quick. She then switched it on…
I have to admit here that my first impressions were… well… underwhelming. While I’d tried to keep my expectations low, it was hard not to hope for miracles! Everything sounded muffled and pretty awful quite frankly. The audiologist cranked up the volume a little which helped but it still wasn’t great. Thinking back, it was probably better than I thought it was at the time. I could hear voices but it was like they were mumbling. My wife says that she could tell that I was hearing more simply because she wasn’t having to repeat everything that my audiologist said anymore. We went for a little walk around the hospital to hear different noises and I could hear various sounds such as footsteps, the lift etc. The audiologist had given me 3 different programmes to play with (there is a maximum of 5 available). The 3 I had were simply louder volumes. She said that in the 24 hours between my switch-on and my second appointment, I’d probably go through those programmes, as my brain got used to the sounds and wanted more. She disabled the volume for the first day (presumably to stop inexperienced users turning it up and blowing their heads off)!
So then it was the journey home. We just avoided rush hour and had an incident free journey home. On the tube, I could hear little snippets of the announcements. For example, I couldn’t hear the name of the station we were at, but I could hear things like ‘this is the Bakerloo line, change here for the Jubilee line’.
During the course of the evening, I tried various things like listening to music, audiobook, radio and computer. Music was fine. I could recognise songs that were familiar to me. The audiobook, I could hear some words but not all. The radio was just noise. I couldn’t make out words. My computer sounded slightly different but I could hear what my screen reader was saying. All of these things were out loud as I didn’t have suitable headphones.
The second day of switch was more exciting for me, as I turned a corner during my second session. The audiologist changed the volume settings and added several programmes of volume for me. This made a huge difference to me and I found that I could hear the audiologist with just my implant, and hold a conversation with her. Again, we went for a wander to get a drink and I started to be able to identify sounds like lift announcements. I also became more aware of environmental sounds- asking my wife what the noise was, saying it sounded like a trolley. In fact it was one of those large commercial wheelie bins, so not far off!
I then had my first rehab appointment. The speech therapist was very keen for me to take things slowly, but laughed when she found out about all my experimenting! She tried a few simple things with me like making sounds and asking me to say whether there were one, two or three of them. She then said some words and I had to say whether they were long or short. She seemed quite impressed when I started to tell her what some of the words were, and said I was showing off! She then showed my wife a category exercise, where I was told a category like flowers, and then had to repeat each word as it was said (rose, daffodil etc). She also suggested that I listen to Victoria read a book while I follow it in Braille.
I went off home, feeling really pleased with my progress, and enjoyed repeating to Victoria all the train announcements, as I heard them! It was a long day but I felt that I had a great result.
Hearing Again 