Well its official, I’m a fully switched on CI cyborg. So here is what happened in a little detail
After waiting in the most packed/hottest waiting room in all of Birmingham we were called in to the audiologists room for the first appointment (I was with my parents who well “insisted” on coming 😉).
A few standard questions like how are you and are you well, checking my op scar and it was time to actually use this thing. First off was listening to beeps, 2 beeps of different pitches, after that more listening to beeps, but louder and louder ones until it gets uncomfortable. I was given a sheet with a line on it with things like “quiet”, “Medium loud”, “Comfortably loud” and “Uncomfortably loud”. The idea being to listen to louder and louder beeps until it becomes unconformable, they are trying to gauge where comfortably loud is. Once that is done I listened to all the beeps at the comfortably loud level and well then it was time to switch to live.
Ahh live sound, where everything is a beep, somebody talking, thats a beep, somebody tapping their foot beep. Somebody coughing…. yep its a beep. Beep beep beep, beeps everywhere, English no longer exists, its now beeplish which is pronounced beep. Lots and lots of beeps, beep beep beep beeeeeeep beep six beep. Wait what? Was that a six? Did I just hear six? It was, I heard six! Soon after that other words started coming through and well they made sense, ok they sound weird like they are being played through a really bad synthesiser thats set to something that an old NES game console can deal with but its unmistakably words, real words, not beeplish. I suddenly became aware of my own voice, its horrible, sounds so close (well duh my mouth is the closest thing to the microphones) and well I hated it, did not want to speak at all, so I tried to make everybody else speak to assimilate all the words and try to keep myself quiet (hard to do when all the other people in the room want to know what is going on). Thankfully this “My voice is crap and I’m becoming a mute” phase did not last long. Looks like with listening to anything through this CI practice is going to make perfect, the more I listened to different sounds, the more they made sense, including my voice which currently sounds like I’m some deep bass voice (which I know is just wrong but its bearable, just).
After that we went over to the hearing therapist for Appointment 2. This is more just talking about how you are finding it, how to tackle this new found hearing (so far it boils down to LISTEN TO ALL THE THINGS!) but I assume as I get used to this ill be working with this therapist to target specific things, advice for tackling specific situations, like for example I picked a Cochlear Mini Mic as my free wireless accessory, he got it paired up, talked me through how to use it and demonstrated it. Unfortunately It did not work in the hospital for some reason but just today I tried it out in a meeting at work, and understanding speech went up again with it so its something I’m going to keep a handy.
And thats about it for now other then a few funny things have happened to me already due to this CI, so I’ve decided to post the short “stories” (if you can call them that) on Twitter under the hashtag #CIBeeps (its all about the beeps) here is a few I’ve had happen to me already if you are reading this and you are a CI user yourself feel free to nick my idea!
Next appointment is the first remapping.
Itchy Implanted 
Thanks, I was “turned on” Monday and this is exactly my experience as well.
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