No earth shattering improvements or revelations this week. I believe my hearing / comprehension is slowly improving with less Donald Duck filter than previously. It is becoming harder to tell though.
I have cranked both the sensitivity and volume up again so I am almost at max. I don’t know if this is helping or hampering, but I am trying to get my brain to focus on comprehending what it is hearing through the implant.
This past week I have been turning captions off so that I force myself to concentrate on understanding the speech rather than just resorting to reading the captions. This definitely requires more concentration on my part but I put that down to having become dependent on captions so, like any “addiction”, it’s a habit that is hard to break. Much like saying “what” automatically any time someone says something.
Meantime, the birds are becoming annoying, with their constant chatter !
I do still try to start my day without my left hearing aid but I have not been continuing my relative pitch ear training or piano practice.
Overall, I am still very pleased with my progress and improved hearing and comprehension although some people are much harder to understand than others.
I am very busy in the orchard at the moment so have not had much opportunity to work on my hearing. That said, when I am in the orchard on my own I wear a bluetooth headset which I have playing Pandora tunes and I find I am hearing instruments that I either never noticed before or have forgotten were there. I will have to dig out some of my CDs and listen to the tracks to see if they were always there or if the “remixed” versions, which I hate, have changed the mix so much. I particularly dislike the way the engineers “re-mastered” so much of the Queen and Beatles music.
My velcro attachment of the battery pack / controller to the inductions coils is working out well. It holds in place well and the way I have the “soft goods” harness setup the coils remain over the battery location pretty well.
Another good week. See you again in a few days.
If you are on this journey, I hope you are having as much success as I.
5 thoughts on “Weekly Progress Update”
Hi Robert,
I am a few weeks behind you at MUSC. I must say your reports are almost identical to mine. One thing I notice is that I have one pitch that screeches. My tolerance of the screech becomes the limiter for volume right now. It also causes me to turn the sensitivity down. I will probably make that a big part of the discussion when I return to MUSC in July.
Another thing I find myself doing is adjusting the volume and sensitivity to individual person speaking when I have the control / charging harness on. What works ok with one often does not work so well with another. Mostly I turn the closed captions off now but occasionally I have to turn them on to fully follow the dialog.
I have been streaming through one Apple Air Pod in the cochlear ear while watching TV or listening to a podcast too. That seems to work pretty well. Hopefully it is training my brain. When I do that I leave the hearing aid out of the other ear.
Take Care
Hi John.
Thanks for the comments. I am very happy with my experience so far. Ecstatic would be more accurate.
I did not have a screeching sound but it sounds like that may be feedback. Although I think in theory that’s not supposed to be possible with the Acclaim…or perhaps it is some conflict / sympathy feedback with a hearing aid you are wearing ?
I thought about doing what you are doing, adjusting the sensitivity and volume base on where I am and with whom I am speaking but I found it too inconvenient for very little benefit. Consequently I just leave my volume up as high as I can tolerate without it feeling like it is making my head vibrate, and I keep the sensitivity as high as I can, just below where environmental sounds become wearying, or interfering.
This means that sometimes the extraneous sounds become intrusive but generally, as time goes by, my brain seems to suppress those sounds.
I will say that I can hear a lot more birds than previously and I can hear the neighbour’s cock crowing 1,000ft away which I never would have heard previously.
I will post some more later this week, just a little busy on the orchard these days.
God bless.
Hi Robert, Thanks for all this good information. I believe I’m about 2 months behind you. My initial activation was done in January and I’ve been to my 1st and 2nd audiologist adjustments. My implant was done on the west coast near where I live in San Diego. I really appreciate the information you are sharing. Seems like my progress would mirror yours with a later start. I agree the battery charger and management tool needs to move to a smart device at some time. I can now hear things I never heard before but the clarity is still a big question. Birds, running water, dropping anything now sounds very loud. I also suffer from a loud pop sound when shallowing. Eating is noisy and difficult to have a conversation while eating. Wondering is you experienced any of these challenges. Thanks again for your updates. It really helps understanding where you and others are on the road to better hearing.
Hi John.
Thank you for the kind words and you are very welcome.
There are a couple of things I think happen, and the first is that what initially appear to be noises are just sounds your brain does not immediately recognize and that, over time, it starts to ignore certain sounds as “normal” background / ambient noise to be ignored.
Either that, or the noise becomes recognizable and categorized as “birds”, “cars”, “dogs” etc.
I say this because initially there seemed to be a lot of “static”, but now I have no static. I can recognize noises as “mouth” noises, or chewing noises, etc. etc.
I found, as you have, that eating while having a conversation is difficult because the implant pics up the chewing noises and they overwhelm the other person speaking. I will say that I have noticed over the past week that this is becoming less of an initially. Initially it was really annoying because the AGC (automatic gain control) in the implant would reduce the volume automatically while chewing which made the speech coming from the other person too soft and indistinct to understand.
Now, I don’t hear the AGC kicking in because I am chewing, and I can hear the other person more distinctly. I would not say I can cope completely, but it does seem to have improved and I do think this is entirely a consequence of my brain learning to cope with the implant.
As for volume, yes, I intentionally crank up both the volume and sensitivity to the point where it is just getting uncomfortable (not sound wise, but making me feel like there is something physical happening). Depending on the volume I have set, this will last a while but eventually subsides and then I increase the volume and sensitivity again.
It is my intention to push the device and my brain to their limits. If I start to feel nauseous, I will back off the volume a bit and then increase it again later.
Also, some voices, and not always male versus female, seem easier to understand than others.
I do remove my left hearing aid any time I am in a passive listening role but, apart from my wife, I can seldom cope in a conversation without my left hearing aid and relying solely on the implant. I do expect this to improve and, generally, I think it is slowly.
Hope this helps.
God bless you.
Thanks Robert. Always comforting knowing what you are going through is common among others. It feels like progress is slow but it is steady. Thanks again for your updates