It's Not Easy Being Borg

Programming a cochlear implant is tedious, time consuming, and exhausting. It involves being hooked up to the audiologist's computer and listening for barely audible tones, beeps, and bleeps to set threshold levels -- followed by trips to the sound booth to test those levels. Then the adjustments begin. "Let's go back and adjust your mid-tones," you hear your audi say. And then you repeat the process over and again.

Your brain gets tired. You aren't sure if you are hearing a tone or if your brain is producing phantom tones on its own.

You look to your audi, who smiles and nods at you reassuringly. She senses your fatigue, but presses onward. She wants to get every little setting perfect.

"Let's try counting the tones. Tell me if you hear one, two, or three," she says. In your mind you think Yeah, like that will make it easier. But you plod on. Closing your eyes. Concentrating on listening for sounds that may or may not be there. Is she making the tones quieter? I'm not sure if I even heard that. "Two," you say with little confidence. "Three," she answers -- a little too cheerfully.

Winners never stop running.

She takes you back to the booth and tells you she wants to test your sentence recognition in noise. Your blood pressure rises and your palms get sweaty. You know this is the practice program you avoid at home. It's impossible. She tells you that last time you tested, she had the noise-voice ratio at 10-90%. She is going to increase it to 20-80. The noise begins and you hear the voice, but you have no idea what the voice said. The word "sabotage" comes through clearly in the 3rd sentence. It's the only one you could distinguish. And it feels a bit forthtelling. It goes on for 5 sentences before she cuts in and says, "OK, that's enough." -- and you know it didn't go so well.

She asks if you want to try it again. You tell her you don't think it would make any difference. She chuckles and says, "I forget how tiring it is for you guys!" You are tired. It's not easy being borg.

Then she tells you that your threshold -- your softest perception of sound -- is at 15 decibels. That's like hearing the ticking of a watch. The ticking of a watch. You are a freakingly awesome, amazing cochlear implant cyborg miracle!

I Can Hear You in My Head

Many extraneous noises in my environment are cochlear implant cringe worthy. Cellophane is the worst, I think. Today, my husband was behind me at the breakfast bar in our kitchen. He opened a plastic candy bag and unwrapped an Andes Mint. Reflexively, I tried to cover my ear to block the excruciating sound of the crinkling, crackling plastic.

It didn't work. I don't hear with my ear anymore. Sound flows in the side of my head now, just behind my eye and a little to the left. I can feel it as much as I can hear it. It's different than before. The juxtaposition is odd and hard to describe to those who've never experienced it. It's akin to an alien mind probe, I imagine.

I can hear you in my head.
Wrap your mind around that!

A Happy Heart

There are days when my impatience makes me want to chunk my cochlear implant processor.  But not today.

My school district's audiologist brought an FM system for me to try out in my classroom. Hearing my students read to me has been an ongoing challenge since I lost my hearing, and it hasn't improved much with the cochlear implant.

I'm trying to be patient and forgiving of myself. I have only been activated for 5 weeks, and I can tell that I am getting better. I'm still considered a baby borg, and my hearing with the implant isn't so great right now. But the work I do in my classroom has been very difficult since my hearing loss, and I find that I beat myself up countless times during the day because my hearing is lacking. I have really high expectations of myself, hearing loss or not. So I asked for help. And I found it. I'm the only classroom teacher in my district with a cochlear implant. I'm pioneering new frontiers.

With the FM system, I plug a receiver into my processor and sync it to a pocket-sized FM transmitter. A lapel mic is plugged into the transmitter and students can read into the mic. I am able to hear my students' voices directly in my CI. And because the transmitter and mic aren't directly attached to my processor like my personal lapel mic from Cochlear is, I don't have to worry that an excitable first grader may leap up from the table and yank my processor from my head! It's not perfect. But it certainly is better.

I decided to test it out in my afternoon reading group. I carefully clipped the mic to the collar of a student I needed to test on sight words. He smiled sheepishly as I did it. Then I asked him to talk so I could test if the mic was positioned well. He grinned at me and asked, "What do you want me to say?" I told him he could say whatever he wanted. "You can say, 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' if you want."

"You heard me?" he asked. (He was surprised! I must miss a lot of what goes on in my room!)

"I heard you," I said. "Now read those words for me!"



My heart was smiling.