Happy in My Heartache

The CI was developed for speech. That's why the ear piece behind my ear is called a speech processor. Music, in all its richness and subtle nuances of tones and undertones, is distinctly different through the speech processor -- noisy and tinny, the speech processor is essentially unable to reproduce much of the tonal qualities that makes music what it is. Or at least what it is to me.

At the risk of igniting a firestorm of disagreement from other cochlear implant recipients who swear that music is a great source of enjoyment for them, I have to say that being late deafened and having been classically trained as a vocalist, and still pretty new at this whole CI thing, I have found music to be unequivocally..., well..... it's plain awful.

I've been told that it will get better with ear training and music listening exercises. My audiologist even suggested that I should begin listening to music and bearing with it even if it sounded terrible. So I subscribed to music therapy to try to improve my music experience. Contrary to much of the lay advice I've heard, my music therapy involves "fresh" listening instead of listening to known songs twenty or thirty times until my brain recognizes it -- music with strong melodies sung by solo artists with instrumentals that are not amplified (my apologies to the electric guitar aficionados out there), and listening without regard to lyrics. One tip is to listen to various art songs in foreign languages so that I would focus on the melody of the song and not be distracted trying to figure out the words. So far, it hasn't worked miracles for me.

So, this afternoon, I cranked up the volume on my car's CD player and took a road trip. With my better ear plugged and my windows rattling, I listened to Josh Groban's CD "All That Echoes" as I careened down the highway. I am a fan of all things Josh Groban, and I knew he was a soloist with lush orchestration accompanying his voice. Nothing Van Halen-ish.

It was mostly non-descript. Not as bad as listening has been in the past, but certainly not great. I didn't think anything could ruin Josh Groban, but, let's just say, my CI wasn't doing him any favors.

Then it happened. Just as it had been when I heard my husband's voice yesterday, it was a sudden revelation. I could hear the song. Not just the words and the voice, but the melody and the instruments. The whole song. (Now mind you, it's not like hearing it through a normal ear, but it was most certainly  an enormous improvement from the clutter of noise that music has been since my CI.)

I became engulfed in "Happy in My Heartache" and found my head bee-bopping and my voice humming along. Here's that little ditty, my first CI song: Happy in My Heartache (click to listen, and see if you bee-bop, too.)

Though Josh Groban is singing of love lost, this little song will have a deeper meaning for me. My hearing loss has been a heartache. But unlike the song, I can find happy in it. It's the first song I've heard post cochlear implant that actually sounded like, well, like music. And it makes me happy.

And All of a Sudden...

CI Boot Camp hasn't been much fun. I really can't hear as well with only my cochlear implant as I do with both my CI and hearing aid. Last week, I began going without my hearing aid to strengthen my CI ear. It isn't easy. My other ear has severe to profound hearing loss, so without the hearing aid, it's really bad at best. Being one-sided "deaf" again has been a struggle, and straining to hear and understand speech is an even bigger challenge. I had a migraine with aura on the fourth day and a tension headache by the end of the week.

During this second week of camp, I've been putting a plug in my other ear. It doesn't block all sound from my ear, but it greatly diminishes what little hearing I have left in it. It's been interesting hearing the world only through the implant. It's hard to describe to people who've never experienced it. The best description I can come up with is that it sounds somewhat like I'm listening to an old portable, AM transistor radio -- you know, the one you begged for when it was 1969 and you were eight years old and your parents finally got it for you for Christmas. Static-y and distant. It took a lot of effort to hear and understand that little radio box, but you were so happy to finally have one, you played it constantly and thought it was the Best. Radio. Ever.

On this 13th day of boot camp, I accompanied my husband to the hardware store. Along the way -- and in the middle of a conversation -- I suddenly became aware that he didn't sound so mechanical. I thought the earplug had fallen out of my other ear. But upon checking, I found the plug tucked securely in my ear. I even pressed my finger against it to block as much sound as I could from that ear.

It was true.

My husband's voice sounded almost completely normal. 

Almost.

I know there will come a day when listening through this cochlear implant will be routine and normal. But for now, these little revelations are amazing and noteworthy.

It's an incredible journey that I am on.

I Love the Rain

This morning, I sat on my covered patio during a rain shower. It was that kind of rain that gently soaks the earth and makes everything smell fresh and clean. It's the kind of rain that whispers in the air and ebbs and flows as the clouds roll across the sky -- softly falling on the earth like sparkling jewels, trickling from the eaves and sprinkling through the leaves of my sturdy oak trees and sometimes sweeping a light mist across the patio to dampen my cheek.  The deep gurgling of the swimming pool across the yard joined nature's orchestra and filled my senses with a symphony of sound: the sound of this rain-gift caressing the earth with her drip-drop song.


Curiously, I slipped the cochlear implant coil from my head -- that odd little magnet that connects my Borg parts -- and I listened intently for the sounds of the rain -- the depth of sound that had flooded my ears was gone. My natural hearing is slipping away.

Then I touched the magnet back to my head and marveled again at the miracle of technology that hears for me when my ears cannot.

I love the rain.

Noise

It's been 6 days since I wore my hearing aid. My audi said I should go for extended times without it -- like a week or two at a time to strengthen my cochlear implanted ear. It's my summer of CI boot camp.

It's making me very grumpy. 

I can hear too many things I really don't want to hear. There's an incessant bird outside my house that chirps from sunrise to whenever I take my CI off for the night. My dog barks at the wind. My husband insists on talking to me from behind while the TV is on. People call instead of texting me. I am inundated with noise. My world is a cringe-worthy, overpowering cacophony of noise. It's driving me crazy.

But I can't hear the things I want to hear. Correction - I don't understand the things I want to hear. I've found myself apologizing to people again. "I'm sorry. What did you say?"

I'm grumpy. And I have a headache. So I yelled at the dog for getting in my way while I was watering my garden. I ignored the clerk in the store when I think she asked if I needed help. I snapped at my husband when he asked me what I was going to do for dinner. I turned off the blaring TV. And I put my CI in its case.

Virtual silence. (My good ear is very bad.) No one said this road would be easy. But I wish it were a little smoother.

This world is too noisy. I want to hear. But I don't like the noise.

Boot Camp, Day 1

I saw my audiologist again yesterday for an adjustment. She is very patient with me and I can tell she is doing the very best she can to help make this cochlear implant successful for me. We talked in length about my frustration and what I can do to make things better.

She called me a perfectionist. Not in a bad way, but in a way that means I'm hard on myself. I expect and demand the best possible outcome for myself.

It's true. I am a perfectionist. In my heart, I know this is just a technological substitute for the real deal. CI hearing will never be as good as natural hearing. But the logic in my brain keeps telling me that I can overcome this. If I just work hard enough, it'll come much closer to being a replacement for my hearing loss. I don't really believe that, though. I fear my heart will win.

I need to stop comparing myself with CI recipients who have no natural hearing left, she cautioned. Listening to others tout their success and telling me their CI is the best thing that ever happened to them and how naturally everything sounds and how much they love listening to music through their CI, and so many other things "they" say, can be counterproductive for perfectionists like me. I'm not like most CI recipients.

One of the things I have to keep in mind, she explained, is that I still have an ear that can hear naturally, albeit pretty poorly, it can still hear. I can compare the CI to natural hearing easily and readily -- something most recipients cannot do. They may say they remember how things sounded before they became deaf, but it's only a memory, and memory can be deceptive based upon our immediate perception and circumstances. My hearing isn't a memory.

Learning to hear with a cochlear implant is a process, she said. I'm only 5 months into that process. "It takes a year, or two, or three for some people," she said. It just takes time.

My fear is and always has been that my other ear will go as suddenly as my deaf ear went. I don't feel like I can hear well enough through the CI to make it. It's just not good enough, I thought aloud. "I think you would be surprised," she said. Then she reminded me that when she put me in the booth several weeks ago, I had done as well as anyone with "perfect" hearing could do. I just need to give myself a break -- and a chance. Stop being such a perfectionist. She didn't say it out loud, thank goodness.

She suggested that while I am away from my classroom this summer that I use the time as a sort of rehabilitative "boot camp". Since I am still fully dependent on my dominant, hearing-aided ear, I am to go for increasingly longer periods of time without it. That will force me to listen more with my cochlear implant. She acknowledged that it would be really hard at first. "It'll make you crazy," she laughed. But I'll adapt and find that I can hear well enough through my CI to do just fine. She even gave me ear plugs for my other ear.

So today, I began boot camp. So far, so good. But I've only had my coffee.

The Proverbial Horse

For Christmas, my daughter gave me the audio book, Ender's Game, to practice listening with my new cochlear implant. I didn't jump right into it, though, being all new with the whole listening rehabilitation thing and wanting to practice easier tasks before I attempted an entire audio book. I'm not sure what I was saving it for, except that I love reading so much, I didn't want my enjoyment of the book to be overwhelmed by my struggle to listen and understand.

The night before I left on a trip, I had my husband help me transfer all of the CDs to my iPod so that I could listen to the book while I was traveling. I could use my personal audio cable (PAC) to listen to the iPod through my cochlear implant rather than using regular earbuds.

I have learned that listening through the PAC is actually better than listening through the processor microphones. One of the deaf education teachers in my school district explained that using the cable eliminates extraneous background noise and makes the sounds easier to discern, thus making listening easier. It's the same circumstance that makes using the FM system to hear my students read so much better than listening without it.

I have to admit that listening to Ender's Game was better than I had expected. I had to resist my urge to read ahead and I had to concentrate on actually staying with the narrator, reminding myself that this was as much an exercise in rehabilitation as it was for entertainment. But once I began, I was happy that I could understand words very well and could even detect changes in pitch, volume, and character voices. The narration still sounded somewhat artificial and robotic, but not nearly as much as I worried it would. I was feeling pretty good about how well I was doing with my CI.

But as I listened to the narration, I began to wonder what the narrator's voice actually sounded like.  I decided to listen with an earbud in my impaired ear to compare how well my CI ear was doing. Without my hearing aid, I had to increase the volume quite a bit, but was able to hear well enough through the earbud to understand the narrator easily.

Maybe it wasn't such a good idea.

The narrator's voice was entirely different from what my CI perceived. As well as I thought I was doing, it's still not the same. And I thought I was going to cry from the disappointment that gripped me at this revelation.

I need to listen to the book with my CI again -- jump back on the proverbial horse and all. Perhaps my cortical reorganization will be helped by knowing what the narrator really sounds like. 

Or maybe not. This cochlear implant thing is really hard.

The Strobe

One of the things that worried me most when I lost my hearing was how I would be able to hear my morning alarm. Without my hearing aids, I am virtually deaf, and I had panic attacks about how I would wake up in time to get to work. Initially, the solution involved my husband waking me at an ungodly hour before he left for work in the early (early-early) morning. I used the extra time to watch the morning news, drink my coffee, and catch up on Facebook. But it meant having to go to bed after supper!

I knew this solution was only temporary -- my husband goes on trips for work, and he had a big hunting trip coming in November.  I began to fret over what I would do when he wasn't there. Having two German Shepherds, I wondered if I could train them to wake me when they heard my phone alarm. I picked a tune that they naturally howled at and reinforced them with doggie biscuits to wake me when they heard it. My female, Penny, had it down the first morning!

They love sleeping indoors with us (They love the biscuits, too!), and they are faithful to wake me, sometimes jumping up to put their paws on the bed beside me. (It is interesting that my husband changed his alarm tune to the same one as mine for a time. The dogs knew it wasn't my alarm and didn't howl at all! So smart!) As a backup plan, I ordered a Sonic Boom alarm clock with a bed shaker. I set it to go off a minute after the phone alarm, but I seldom need it. The dogs are that good! I haven't overslept since I lost my hearing!

I recently learned that my iPhone also has accessibility features for the hard-of-hearing. There is a strobe that can be used with the alarm. I turned it on, but it hasn't been much of a factor in waking me. It's not bright enough to wake me from a dead sleep.

Until Monday morning, that is.

Being the first Monday of my summer vacation, I was a little annoyed that the strobe chose this day to wake me. I thought I had turned the alarm off.

As I rolled over to turn it off, I noticed Penny asleep on the floor beside me. She wasn't howling. And my phone wasn't flashing.

It was Mother Nature's strobe. I'd been roused from my sleep by lightning.