Posted by When I arrived, I saw my dad waiting for me inside. We walked to my appointment, I was nervous but dad was even more nervous than me. While waiting to be called, I think back about what Dr. Barb explained to me and I reminded myself, once again, to keep my expectations in check, I’m really not going into the activation thinking that the specialist will hit a button and BOOM! Cynthia can hear! I know I am going to have a lot of work and rehabilitation ahead of me. I anticipate certain sounds will be unidentifiable and bizarre at first. Instead of high expectations, truly, I have no idea what I’m about to experience. Though I have watched plenty of you tube videos, and though others have shared their activation experiences with me, I am not prepared for that moment. I don’t know how I could be. Of course, I’m extremely curious to start my new life with the cochlear implant.
But first, few days before activation, I was cleaning out my small suitcase and found my right hearing aid. Just to test if I can still hear or not although I was told I may not due to the surgery. To my surprise I could hear, I panicked a little thinking something was wrong. I told Dr. Barb that I could still hear with my hearing aid, she said that its possible there could be some residual hearing so we went in the testing room to give me a hearing test. To her surprise, the audio graph showed the same graph as last hearing test; there was no change. Dr Que Hee is the best surgeon, he did so well when he put in the cochlea without damaging any nerve hairs.
While I was sitting in my specialist’s office, my implant hooked up to her computer. I thought about all my other CI friends who went through the ‘Switch On’, that they got pricked feeling in their eyes, and one got a whack in the head, I worried a little. As she prepared the switch on, I was ready for the effect of being pricked in the eyes and a whack in the head. To my surprise, I felt nothing and quietly said to myself, “Thank God!”. The first sound startled me and I thought “What the fuck is that?”. It was like an electricity surge through my brain. When she was testing the volume and how much loud I could take with the beeps, it sounded like a train beep. When she talks, it was so weird and I couldn’t make sense of the words.
Out in the real world with the cochlear on, every sounds and words I hear is WOOT WOOT WOOT. When I came back the next day so she can see how I went overnight and for my first mapping. I told her about the challenges since activation. I explained that I was not able to hear my dad talking, he was a quiet talker, I could hear Bob because he couldn’t hear well so he talks loud. I told her how at the Thai restaurant and at the pub, I was checking out the sounds with my left hearing aid switched off and try to hear with cochlear side, that I wasn’t able to hear the person talking while the music on nor the chopping noises in the kitchen. Since activation was just a constant hum, more like an annoying cicadas.
Since my specialist, Dr. Barb, told me I was doing so wonderfully, I was fired up to rehabilitate and to truly start hearing. I had previously purchased an app on my iPhone; though designed for children, I figured it couldn’t hurt for me to try it. The app is called Hope Words and it is made by Cochlear, the company that also manufactures my implant. The premise behind the app is that the user can select a letter of the alphabet and the program will go through various vocabulary words and pictures for a particular sound.
When I first activated the app, I would go through the words and they sounded much too similar to identify.
I am confidence that the more I learn, the better and quicker I will be able to understand the words and not hear this WOOT WOOT WOOT like an owl from ABC 4 Kids ‘Timmy Time’.
Notice my shaved part has grown.
Cynthia A. The life of a deaf introvert! 