Not much change to report this week. I did crank the volume up to profile 4, the max I have, last week. I don’t notice much change except perhaps a little more background noise. I can’t be sure if that’s the environment or the device but I will try turning down the sensitivity because that would reduce environmental noise but should have little to no impact on device noise.
I have been out pruning and picking up clippings in the orchard again this week. I do notice that the birds are sounding more natural and I can hear more of them.
The fellow I have been working with remains a struggle to comprehend. Not as bad as it was at first but his accent – heavy South African Zulu – is very difficult. My wife doesn’t have as much problem so clearly her hearing is better than mine. I can understand him better than the day we started.
I continue to watch TV news for about an hour each day without my hearing aid and I start each day without my hearing aid which means I get at least 2 hours a day depending largely on the implant. Also when I’m around large machinery, like the tractor, I turn the heard aid off so that makes me more dependent on the implant.
As soon as I am finished with the pruning process I will be back to ear training in the morning in earnest. It has been difficult to do that for the past 4 weeks because we start very early in the orchard. I expect once I go back to ear training things will start to improve more rapidly.
Stay tuned 🙂
UPDATE: This is a same day update to this post. If you read my early entries you will know that I have had pretty severe tinnitus since I was in my thirties (at least). I did mention at the beginning of this blog that the tinnitus in my right ear, which is not technically correct, but seems to be on my right side, was all but gone.
Today, while out working in the orchard, I realized that my tinnitus has receded to such an extent that I have not even thought about it since I last wrote about it here. So then, I decided I would “listen” for it and I realized that not only is my right side tinnutus gone, but my left side is seriously subdued compared to how it has been.
Later today, I was talking to my neighbour after dropping off a China Pearl tree in a pot and suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, I realized I did not have my hearing aid turned on (because I had driven over on the tractor). So I turned it on in a panic 🙂 I expect I was doing some lip reading along with listening with the implant but I am very please that I was able to have a conversation and did not even realize that my hearing aid was not turned on initially.
As I said earlier…stay tuned.