This morning, at roughly the same time as yesterday and the day before when I charged it 100%, my battery was reading 48%. That would mean that my average consumption, leaving it on 24 hours, is around 23%.
As a matter of habit, I am now starting my day without my left hearing aid. It is a quieter part of my day as it is when I drink my coffee, feed the savages (dogs), and sit down to catch up on investments, news, and update my diary here. All this to avoid practicing the piano (just kidding).
I am also making a point of removing my left hearing aid for at least an additional 15 minutes in the middle, and again at the end, of the day. The end of the day is spent catching cable news with the captions on and switching between reading the captions, reading lips and not reading anything.
The bad news is that I have not yet started using a retraining app., but will probably start that today or tomorrow.
Nothing too exceptional yesterday except that while out flying R/C airplanes with a couple of friends one of them asked if I heard the car horn and I had to say no. Then I corrected myself and said well, I may have heard it but not recognized it as a car horn.
Generally, I can tell that the tone and sound recognition is continuing quite a lot more quickly than speech, but speech is also improving a little.
I also changed profiles in the middle of the day yesterday to profile 2. Dr. Kara says it’s really a matter of personal preference and what feels comfortable. I did try profiles 3 and 4 but figured I don’t have any need to rush.
We had a ton of rain yesterday morning and this morning I am pleased to say that the shower is sounding pretty normal at this point.
By “normal” I mean it is sounding how I remember it sounding a l-o-o-o-n-g time ago 🙂
Last night was the first night that I was in an environment with a lot of people, many talking at once, in a small room. What I noticed was that, while I couldn’t really pick out any conversations except to pay attention to the person I was talking to, unlike with hearing aids the people further away were not overwhelming. I guess that is to do with the sensitivity setting in the implant. The implant has a volume setting, which makes sound louder or softer, and a sensitivity setting which enlarges or shrinks the area from which it will recover sound. Probably like the gain on a microphone.
Later today I will be at an EAA chapter meeting in Columbia where we were just installing acoustic tiles on the ceiling because a lot of us old guys have hearing issues and the echo was troublesome. I will be interested to see how the implant works in that environment.
Speech
Today it is a little more comprehensible, but still very artificial and difficult to understand. I am working on comprehending my wife first thing in the morning without my hearing aid and I think it’s improving, but not to the point that it is easy.
Music
I have not played or practiced any instruments since I played the guitar yesterday. Listening to music is as good as it was before I had the implant with the exception that the implant sounds more distorted than my right ear did with a hearing aid.
A lot of the sounds are becoming real, a lot of the sounds, particularly speech, still sound metallic.
Thanks for reading. More tomorrow…God willing.