A quick update for anyone reading my posts,
The past 2 months I have been working in our orchard sales office with a lot of new voices to cope with. I am very pleased to be able to say that I think I have managed very well. It isn’t the best environment, a 14 x 24 shed with lapboard walls that echo when a number of people are all talking at the same time. Nevertheless, I have been able to cope reasonably well.
I have also had to answer the telephone a number of times each day and, for convenience and because I know I hear better with both ears, have always used the speaker phone for conversations. Again, not having any real difficulty having conversations in this manner.
The downside has been that over the last two days, I have tried to have conversations with the receiver in my hand and held up to my ear. The bad news is that this did not work very well. There is essentially no bass in my implanted ear so all I get is an extremely thin voice that is hardly discernible, never mind comprehensible. I cannot use my left ear because of the hearing aid which has its microphones on top of my ear. Consequently, I found the only way I could have a conversation with the receiver held to my head was to remove my left hearing aid, turn up the volume on the receiver to max, and use my left ear with its remaining, very limited, hearing.
I’m not giving up on this so as soon as I have the time I am going to work on figuring out how to make my implant work better. My main concern here is that, should I lose my left hearing completely, that even with the implant I might effectively be incommunicado. That’s not a prospect I cherish.
Meantime, I am still very pleased with the overall result achieved with the implant combined with my remaining left hearing.