7 weeks after the switch-on

I observe some inter­est­ing effects of the speech/hearing therapy.

First, I can dis­crim­i­nate vow­els. I still con­fuse some of them, but there is def­i­nitely some progress.

How­ever, I’ve noticed a strange prob­lem with some­thing I could do before the CI, namely, the recog­ni­tion of num­bers. In Pol­ish, the num­bers (from 1 to 99) are quite dis­tinc­tive and easy to dis­crim­i­nate. Even with my hear­ing aids, I could rec­og­nize most of the num­bers with­out lipread­ing. I haven’t done this exer­cise for a while, but my Mother has decided to try it on our last ses­sion. Sur­prise: I couldn’t under­stand any­thing at first. When I con­cen­trated a bit on lis­ten­ing, it was bet­ter and after a while I could rec­og­nize a lot of num­bers (but not all of them) again.

I think that it is easy to explain. I now hear all these sounds of speech I couldn’t before, mostly rustling sounds (there is plenty of them in Pol­ish). These sounds are quite loud for me now. And the num­bers’ names sound com­pletely dif­fer­ent. I had to learn them again.

I was on hol­i­days this week. One day I haven’t put my hear­ing aid on because of an ear­lobe irri­ta­tion. And it was not this bad. I knew when some­one was call­ing me and I knew more or less what was going on around. The low sounds were still strange, but they were sounds at least. Talk­ing was more dif­fi­cult, though. Dur­ing the din­ner I had turned my hear­ing aid on again.