Wednesday, November 5, 2008

First MAP

I had my first real map today since being activated last week and I'm just amazed with this thing! At first I was slightly disappointed. It sounded very high pitched, metallic and garbled, but after 2 or 3 days I started understanding some words coming thru and that was so cool!
It is going to take some time and effort but I already know that this is going to help me tremendously. I've been doing some listening exercises on the internet and it seems to help a lot. I wear a hearing aid in my left ear but I turn it off for a few hours a day so I can concentrate on the implanted ear.

I forgot to ask for a copy of my audiogram but I was in the mild-moderate loss range. I got 100% on the words that my audi read (NO lipreading), but the sentences weren't as good, I scored 38%. I did terrible on the words read from the recording, but I was close on quite a few(duck, dock.. cab, cat, etc). But hey, it's only been a week and the test was before the new map so I'm very happy with my progress so far!

The new map is slightly better, it's not so high pitched. My audi also put 4 programs in... 1 is for everyday, 2 is for backround noise, 3 is focus and 4 is for music. I can't say they sound very different yet. My only complaint is that voices still sound chipmunk-like and sort of distorted but it's not nearly as bad as it was. I can't wait for next week!

5 comments:

Katie-Louise's blog said...

Hey Dawne,

woop! a week already! It's noraml to be hearing chipmunck voices, that doesn't usually fade away till after a few months.

Myself had the cartoon voices, that didn't faded till after my 6months mapping which I had a few weeks go!

Don't give up, it will only get better. I don't wear my aids on the other ear now, it turn out that I hear more better with only the implant and if i had the h-aids on the other ear, it doesn't sound right!

keep it up, and i look forward to more of your post :-)

katie-louise

David said...

And it only gets better.

Lissa said...

What implant have you got?

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Abbie said...

100%? Dude that is freakin' fantastic! Things will get better as time goes on. Your brain has to wake up and learn how to hear all over again. It is quite a journey and it requires some patience but you will get there :)