Back to School...Day 4

I have just taken my CI off after 8 hours of usage with my HA in my other ear. I am cream crackered! I am so tired I am just going to bullet point my observations.

  • When I keyed in the code for the building, each button made a beep! Never heard it beep before!
  • My board pens are squeakier on the board than I remember. 
  • Doors generally make a more audible creaking sound. 
  • The children are interesting to listen to. I found myself not having to really squint and concentrate on them. A couple of times I had to ask children to repeat but they had very soft voices and so I explained that they needed to speak up. 
  • The hall assembly was interesting to listen to, I felt more comfortable listening to what was happening further away as children received their certificates whereas before it had always been indistinct. 
  • Playtime was ok, children weren't too overwhelming and I could talk to my colleague over the noise without too much trouble. 
  • I got some equipment from the PE store and could hear the key making a distinctly jangly noise, never heard that before.
  • PE felt easier to do, there wasn't the noise of the wind annoying me, and I felt more in control of how my voice carried. 
  • One of my colleagues commented that my voice was a slightly different pitch and that I was speaking more loudly. 
  • We did music and I could hear the glockenspiels over the sound of the song we were practising!
  • At lunch, I sat at the table in the staffroom and could pick out snippets of conversation from around me as long as I was looking. It seemed a lot quieter in the staff room. So either my HAs have always amplified to an uncomfortable level so everything became louder, or my CI has a super cool sound processing strategy. For Medel this is called Fine Structure Processing, you'll have to go to the Medel website to investigate for yourselves! That's something I cannot stress enough. RESEARCH! All CI companies have different quirks and features, you alone are in charge of working out what would potentially work best for you. Obviously, this depends on whether you have been given a choice by the CI centre but I am, and have always been a firm believer that if you do not ask, you do not get. Nothing ventured, nothing gained! 
  • Managed 8 hours, came to about 4:15pm and CI came off. My head feels slightly like it is burning on my scalp which is just weird. I'm going to have dinner and then put it back on afterwards so I can practice the days of the week and months of the year with Peter. I have to turn my head away so I can't lipread, listen - check and then listen again, with or without a correction. I'm getting better at it but it is tricky! I can hear how the syllables sound different, and how some words have soft starts. September and December are hard, the initial sounds are very soft. October is my favourite. 
  • Er, what am I doing after the days and months? I'm playing with some instruments so that I can practice listening to different pitches and get a sense of the differences in pitch as that is something that needs work. I was listening to a piece of music on classical fm this morning, it was an odd one, lovely pianos and woodwinds with the occasional knock knock knock sound, so I turned my HA off and I couldn't hear most of it. It sounded like a murmuring with distinct knocks. That's how I would describe most unfamiliar music, as a murmur with just the CI but with things I know, I can 'imagine' it and almost overlay the input to force it to sound right? Does that make any kind of sense?
  • I'll report back on the box of delights!

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