The Switch On

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!

?: Please Take your items
Me: Eh?
Me: ohh it's the checkout machine I think: *Bitch I'll take them when I'm good and ready* #CIBeeps

— Itchster (@Itchster) August 12, 2015

Me: Where is that music coming from?
?: What music
Me: it's faint but it's not random
?: nothing is playing
it was a fan motor… #CIBeeps

— Itchster (@Itchster) August 12, 2015

Next appointment is the first remapping.

Got an operation date, 14th July 2015

Not much to say other then well this:

Nuf said, now to prepare!

Cochlear Candidate Information Day

So this was a sorta presentation thing by the Cochlear company (thats the name of the company that makes the Nucleus 6 Implants). It went how you would expect a corporate thing to go, freebies (pens, rubbers leaflets and the bribe, I mean chocolates in the picture).

Then their was the presentation, all live text scribed as well (well they are dealing with people who can’t hear!) so it was not an issue for me to keep up with it for once! They talked about the company, you know the normal stuff for this sort of thing boils down to “we are great we do so much of this look at our shiny HQs!” not much interesting for me then they moved on to explaining the Nucleus 6 in quite a bit of detail:

• It has a nano coating to make it splash proof, also has additional expensive accessories (we are talking £30-160) for various ways to make it totally submersible (these range from “put it in a special cut plastic bag and stick it to your head” to a full plastic jacket not unlike a phone case but totally sealed in)
• Wireless accessories: a mini microphone that you can give to people to clip onto them or use it in a group situation by putting it on a table. A bluetooth phone clip thats basically a bluetooth headset but clips on to your body since the sound goes through the implant. And a TV streamer to stream that sound direct. The cool thing is though you can mix the sound from the wireless accessories with the sound coming from the processors microphones so you can hear both at the same time and control the balance between the two.
• They also mentioned a “in development” feature. Made for iPhone compatibility, not sure if they meant this is coming for the Nucleus 6 or a future processor model they only said “in the future” but it looks like the audio streaming and using an iPhone app to control the implant like you would with the remote control that comes with it. Handy since well you would not have to have the remote you could just use an iPhone, also had a feature called find the processor, for all those times you misplace it, considering I do that all the time with hearing aids at home (not when out and about) that will be handy!

They also mentioned something about including accessories with your implant order, so not sure (i should of asked it did not occur to me at the time) if that means that I can pick some accessories when choosing the implant/colour with the NHS picking up the tab or you add them on to the order and well I pay. Hmm either way I can see that mini microphone being the first must have thing, still don’t quite believe that ill be able to talk on the phone with this at all. but we will see.

After that presentation they had a current cochlear implant user give a speech, answer questions and so on. The one thing I came away from with that was he did not struggle to understand people speaking at all, I have no idea how his actual speech was, my parents never said anything odd about it. But he had no trouble talking and engaging with the room. So I guess thats proof it can work eh?

Fourth appointment: Audiology Cochlear clinic

Note: this actually happened on the 6th of Feb but I forgot to post it to the blog oops!

Today was the mystery audiology clinic appointment. Well mystery solved it was hearing tests mainly. 

The first two tests were set up with a row of monitors and speakers in a semi circle arc type thing. I sat in this circle and watched a video of a guy speaking to me (it was only in the monitor right in front of me the others were not used for my test anyway). The idea was to simply repeat anything he said that I understood. I had to do it both with my hearing aids and without. Seriously stressful for me I hate having to strain to understand strangers  

The other hearing test was the standard test they give you all the time, anybody who has been to an audiology clinic will know what I’m on about but it’s basically they give you a button, you listen to sounds either via headphones or a speaker and you press the button when you hear something. 

After that it was a questionnaire with questions like how your hewing effects your life (social situations, work and so on).  

So that was that! Next up is some sort of “Candidate day” organised by the company Cochlear (the manufacturers of the implant I think I’m getting) I suspect it’s some sort of sales pitch but what the hell eh?