This has been a very interesting week for me in my journey with the Envoy Acclaim totally embedded cochlear implant.
Last Sunday I was practicing the guitar without my hearing aid, relying completely on the implant and what little hearing I had left in my left ear.
To be sure, it did not sound wonderful. I still have a lot of Donald Duck filter in my cochlear implanted ear so the guitar sounded not great. Interestingly, the piano sounds much better than the guitar. It’s not impossible to rely on just the implant, but music certainly sounds a lot better, at least at this point, with my left hearing aid on as well as the implant.
Listening to music with just the implant is also not great right now but with my hearing aid as well it is really a huge improvement over what two hearing aids provided.
Noisy environments are still a bit of a struggle. I think I will try reducing the sensitivity in a noisy environment to see if that improves things. The problem here is that the only way to do this with the Acclaim at the moment is to have the charger with me.
My “light headedness” is all but gone. If I exert myself and twist around quickly, then I still get a sense of weakness. I don’t really feel “light headed” or about to fall or pass out, it’s just a bit weird.
I am back to practicing ear training now and practicing my instruments as I believe that helps with the retraining.
I have also made it a principle for watching the TV, mainly news and an occassional movie, that I watch without my hearing aid and that I make a real effort to get by without reading captions – sometimes having them turned off entirely – and without reading lips. In fact, I only turn on captions if I cannot understand anything being said but I find that if I concentrate I can understand something more than 50%.
In point of fact, whenever it is not essential for me to be able to communicate, I am either removing or turning off my hearing aid as much as possible.
In a way, I wish I had 2 implants already because they are so much more convenient than hearing aids. However, I cannot depend completely on the Acclaim yet for communication purposes. I am working on it and I am still very pleased with the progress so far.
At times I can understand completely, even when I am not looking at the speaker. Other times not so much.
I do have the volume on the implant cranked up, on profile 4.
I have also found some interesting hearing test stuff on the internet I’ve been playing with but it isn’t really helping me to any extent, so far.
Stay tuned…