One month after the switch-on — reprogramming.

The visit to the cen­tre after one month — tests and repro­gram­ming of the proces­sor. We are asked about our impres­sions from this first month and we fill in numer­ous ques­tion­naires. Then there is a meet­ing with a speech ther­a­pist, the exam­i­na­tion dur­ing which I am to say how loud the sounds are, proces­sor pro­gram­ming and an appoint­ment with the otolaryngologist.

It seems that this was the last meet­ing of our lit­tle Nucleus Free­dom group. In July we all come to the cen­tre again for stan­dard tests, but we have sep­a­rate appoint­ments.
W. says that she under­stands speech bet­ter than before, she knows what her chil­dren are talk­ing about when they are play­ing, but she hears ring­ing all the time. It turns out that her pro­gram­ming has been too loud.
The speech ther­a­pist gives me some dif­fer­ent ideas about my hear­ing exer­cises. I am to lis­ten more, fol­low­ing the text which I see. I can use both hear­ing aid and CI or CI only for the train­ing. We don’t test my word recog­ni­tion, because for me it is too early. I see some progress: a lot of the sounds dur­ing the tests I can hear nor­mally. It turns out that I hear the high sounds, and feel the low ones. In the­ory, it should com­ple­ment my hear­ing with a hear­ing aid. In prac­tice, things are more com­pli­cated.
I feel the low sounds in my teeth.

Dur­ing the repro­gram­ming I get stronger sig­nals on all elec­trodes. The sig­nal should be above the response thresh­old of the audi­tory nerve. The said thresh­old is deter­mined with­out the need of my inter­ac­tion, by some mea­sure­ment. I am to tell only if some­thing is too loud.

For some time after the repro­gram­ming I feel like at the begin­ning, a bit dizzy, as if some­one was hit­ting me in the head with a big soft sponge. It passes after short time. The sur­round­ings become noisy. I get much more sounds in the places which were always silent for me.

I have three pro­grams which I should change in 5–7 days, each one a bit louder. My pre­vi­ous pro­gram is there too, as a backup, but it seems that I will not be need­ing it. I feel OK with the new one. How­ever, the first two-three evenings I am very tired. It passes quickly too, my brain is get­ting used to pro­cess­ing more data.

With the new pro­gramme, the “echo” from the CI seems to drown the sounds I get from the hear­ing aid. I am anx­ious if I would be able to talk to people.

On Thurs­day I pass the first real-life test: long talk with a per­son I know well, but in a for­eign lan­guage. Mod­er­ately noisy envi­ron­ment. It goes bet­ter than expected. I get sounds I didn’t before, like “s”, “sh”, maybe even “k” and “t”. Any­way, the talk was not more dif­fi­cult than before, maybe even a bit easier.

Next day, in the doctor’s wait­ing room, I hear the heels tap­ping behind closed door and I know that it is my turn.

I begin to get infor­ma­tion from the envi­ron­ment. I need exer­cises for hear­ing and under­stand­ing speech.

I am get­ting addicted to the proces­sor. When I don’t have nei­ther the hear­ing aid nor the proces­sor on, it is all right, just like in the morn­ing or in the bath. But if I wear the hear­ing aid alone, I miss some­thing. The audi­tory envi­ron­ment is get­ting one-dimensional.

Bat­ter­ies: Wednes­day the 18th, with the new pro­gramme. I expect them to die in a while.