At the beginning of the second appointment, we covered off questions, details, admin, and then we went straight to adjustments. I confirmed what almost all people said about the delay with the sound between the hearing aid and the cochlear implant. I also discussed my challenges with certain aspects of the environment, noise, distinguishing between male and female voices, etc.

So apparently the brain will work out the delay or will just get used to the delay between devices in around 6 months time…. ugh!

I mentioned a range that sounded like die-ing cats on the piano, which led to the discussion of the fact that I could hear individual notes. The audiologist was in SHOCK! The first few times I sat down at the piano, the notes were clustered in groups of 5 or 6 notes that would be the same sound. After only a few times of listening to my boyfriend (Sam) play a few scales, I was able to distinguish between individual notes!!

She was thinking that everything in the high range on the piano would sound the same…. “no, I can tell the difference!” I said. “There are still clusters of 2 or 3 notes that sound the same but I can hear it!”

I am pretty sure she went into complete shock with this news.

We went through the sound mapping and tolerance test once again. She made an adjustment, but then things began to echo even more. We went to focus on the “twangy” range I have with speech, so she went to grab a different audiologist that was specialized.

The Speech Session:

A second audiologist who is also a speech specialist came into the room. I had a session booked with her right after. She came in to specifically focus on helping me to move forward with my rehab.

I asked if having a specific range of sound that was completely weird was normal. They both said no, that it was my brain interpreting it this way… and that maybe I had lost my high pitches first. No,… the high pitches went first and I have those…. My personal theory is that my hearing became distorted with speech for a couple of years near the end. Maybe my brain hung onto that information… ??

The second audiologist (specializing in speech) asked a couple of questions and sound went blank while she made adjustments. Once the sound was turned on again, I noticed sound quality improved. I could finally hear a subtle difference between male and female voices!!

Now, for a series of speech tests. A part of me thought this was silly… We started with a few questions that were asked the first week, like repeating numbers. Then we got into a few harder sentences with some interesting vowels. I have been practicing words, sentences, vowels, etc, quite a bit and I was finding this SO easy! I felt like saying “can you make your voice high pitch to go into my challenging range…”… but I didn’t.

Audiologist #2 said: “There are not many more adjustments I can do here. You’re doing… “Phenomenal”. The audiologists both said tpgether.

No one said this directly, but I knew I was way ahead of the usual curve.