I don't accept limitations

I had my pre-operative assessment in Manchester today. I had my height, weight, blood pressure checked and then blood taken. All done within 30 minutes, not the 1-2 hours listed on the letter! This was followed by me killing time at Manchester Museum, I like checking out the critters in the vivarium. Inside the glass enclosures are beautiful little poison dart frogs and all sorts of lizards. After spotting lots of cute frogs I went back to the hospital for my final hearing test. When I got into the testing room, I was really nervous that they were going to repeat the open set sentences discrimination test, which is awful to do. Turns out it was just a straight forward bleep test. The lovely audiologist explained that everything was done and that it was a matter of waiting for a date. Several people currently on the wait-list are too poorly to undergo surgery so hopefully I'll get an operative slot fairly soon. In other news, this finally grew on me , it's ridiculously ca...

I met the actual surgeon, a Mr Freeman, last Wednesday to discuss my case further. It was really informative and I left feeling more confident and optimistic about the procedure and outcomes. In short, my case can be summarised as follows: 1 - I have bilateral hypoplastic cochleas, which is essentially 'under formed' cochleas. I have three quarters of a turn as opposed to the two and a half turns typically found. 2 - My cochlea on the left side looks like a very flat number 9 in that there is a curve at one end but it is very small. Regardless, the surgeon is optimistic that an electrode array could be inserted along the cochlea's length thereby giving me a full range of pitch perception, theoretically speaking. 3 - Medel has two cochlear electrode arrays which are suitable. One which is 12mm (tiny) and the other which is 19mm. The surgeon is optimistic having looked at the scans, that the small one will fit. However, they will have a small probe they can insert to ch...