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.

Oh the Joy

I had to leave a professional development meeting this week to change my cochlear implant battery. Those little low battery tones are often a nuisance, but sometimes they're a little like Ode to Joy -- like when you must leave a presentation you've had the pleasure of sitting through at least four times -- for a legitimate reason... I had left my batteries in my spare parts kit locked safely in my classroom.

Upon returning to the meeting, the low battery warning in my hearing aid went off, as well.

Joyful, joyful, we adore thee...

I had to leave the meeting again. I should learn to carry spare batteries with me at all times, but I'm appreciative that this day was not the day I had done so! The bliss of getting to change my second set of batteries was immense.

I will have to remember to ask my audi if she can change my low battery tone to Ode to Joy.

Oh the joy of being battery-powered.

Suffer the Children

Oklahoma has failed it's children.

The state of Oklahoma enacted a pathetic, punitive law that seeks to retain any third grade student who doesn't pass the reading portion of the state-mandated reading test. The law was passed, disregarding the wishes of the thousands of citizens in this state who opposed and lobbied their state legislators to vote against it. To add insult to injury, an amended version of the law that would restore the decision to retain students based on a portfolio of student work, multiple assessment, and determined by parents, teachers, and reading specialists, passed solidly in both legislative houses, but was vetoed by a governor who is playing politics with our children's futures. This law is discriminatory. It punishes children because of their disabilities and differences. It forces all children into a "one-size-fits-all" assessment of their "abilities."

The fallout of this law is huge, and it is only the beginning. Parents and citizens are joining educators across our state in expressing outrage over the compulsory retention of students based on a single, high-stakes test score. They are furious that the stakeholders closest to our students -- the parents and educators who know these children and their abilities -- have been indiscriminately replaced by arrogant legislators who think they know best. It's government intrusion at its worst.

Today I read an article in our local newspaper that extolled the tragic results of this law on our children. All of the stories of "failing" children are heart-wrenching. But one story hit a personal chord with me. All ten of the deaf children being served in my district's deaf education program were deemed "unsatisfactory" and will not be able to go to the fourth grade. They received unsatisfactory scores on a test in reading that is largely based on phonological knowledge of words and language. Now remember, these are children who are deaf and cannot HEAR those phonemes upon which our language is based, and who have limited knowledge of what our language sounds like. Their primary means of communication is American Sign Language. They could be held in the third grade for two more years. That would mean they would be 20 when -- or if -- they graduate from high school.

Imagine yourself as a nine year-old child, sitting in a classroom, and being subjected to your first ever standardized test; a test that is taken for two days, for approximately two hours each day, and knowing that your future career as a student is dependent upon this single test score, no matter who you are or what you have done up to this time, or what you will do after this time. It is a single score on a one-time, high-stakes standardized reading test --regardless of your individual disabilities, learning differences, native language, or extenuating life circumstances --that will make or break you.

Now imagine that you have never heard a single word, or even a sound, in the language of the test you are being subjected to take. You are deaf. Alone. Without modifications. Without help.

And now, you will be forced to endure it all over again next year. Because you have been deemed unworthy. You are unsatisfactory.

What have we done to our children?

Elections have consequences. And we are paying sorely for the decisions we, as citizens, made in the voting booth. It is time for things to change.