6-month Update

I met with my ENT and audiologist for a 6-month checkup. First, the ENT (who did my surgery) checked my ear with an otoscope and tested for vertigo or any other side effects. All is good on the physical side. No pain, no discomfort, and minimal vertigo.

Now... the hearing test. My audiogram stayed about the same (20-25 dB) and I had two tests. First, I had to listen to a set of sentences with zero background noise and repeat them back to the audiologist to see how much information I heard. The zero noise test is a controlled test and not representative of real life scenarios where there is always some type of background noise. This was the first time I have taken this type of test, and I scored 38%. The second test is the HINT sentence test. HINT stands for "hearing-in-noise-test", and the background noise was set at 10 decibels quieter than the voice. This test is supposedly more representative of most real life scenarios with zero context and without visual aids. I scored 25% on that test.

While it is an improvement over that 11% score 4 months ago, I won't lie and say that I wasn't one tiny bit disappointed in these numbers. However, it's still an improvement, and my auditory memory is only 6 months old. People who get CI after being late deafened (or are post-linguistically deaf) usually shoot up their learning curve within a few months to a year after activation. But people like me, pre-linguistically deaf adults who get CI later in life, will probably need a lot more time to create their auditory memories.

I have a confession to make: I have not been doing my listening exercises as often as I should. Thirty minutes once or twice a week instead of at least one hour every day.

But... but but but... after the tests, I am now motivated to do my listening exercises every day for at least 45 minutes to 1 hour, minimum. I can put some mp3s on an iPod and plug in, anywhere, anytime. There are absolutely no excuses!

The way I figure it is if I can recognize my own name without reading lips, there's no reason I wouldn't be able to recognize most of the words in the English language. However, there's over 100,000 commonly used words in the English language, so learning how to recognize them all is obviously going to take time. Before my activation, I thought I would be able to hear most of what people say within one year. That looks a little too optimistic now. It'll be a couple years, minimum - more likely a few years.

That said, I still have no regrets for my decision. I cannot imagine life without my CI, and I can't go back to a hearing aid. There have been real, tangible, and measurable benefits that I have been getting from my CI now... including following group conversations to some extent, having less of a need for interpreting services, not asking people to repeat themselves as often (still do, but not as much), and having more smooth-flowing conversations that are less awkward. Not only that, but my speech is still getting better (my speech pathologist gave me some diaphragm breathing exercises for improved voice tonality), which makes it easier for people to understand me. So, in the real world, it's actually better than what the numbers say.

Alright, I gotta get back to my listening exercises!