Sunday morning I decided I would try to depend on my Acclaim cochlear implant entirely by removing my hearing aid from my left ear. This isn’t total dependence because in reality I can still get some audio information from my left ear even without the hearing aid, but it’s pretty close and I did not want to be completely deaf.
I am very pleased to be able to report that I was able to understand about 85% of the pastor’s message without having to resort to lip reading or reading the text on the screen. I think this is the first time I’ve been able to do this, certainly since the implant and probably for at least 10 years. I had not tried removing both hearing aids, when I had them, to see to what extent I could understand the speaker, but certainly yesterday I managed pretty well with just the implant.
I still had the chpimunk / Donald Duck effect “turned on”, but it did not seem to bother me as much or hamper my comprehension.
Then, last night, I found I was able to comprehend the dialogue on the TV without captions. I have a habit of removing my hearing aid when watching the TV to force me to depend on the implant but honestly this morning I don’t recall if I did that or not. I will have to check tonight or tomorrow or something.
This morning, after two weeks ago, I went to my small men’s Bible Study / breakfast and clearly was able to understand all of the conversation, to about 90%, despite the noise.
So all in all, these past 2 days have been very encouraging in terms of development and brain retraining. Every day seems a little better but the last 2 days were a significant improvement, so far as I can tell.