CI success, helpful hints. Part 1

These are my thoughts on why a CI has been successful for me, by sharing them they may be helpful for others.

It goes without saying that you need a good CI team especially the surgeon and audiologist. Not everyone has a choice in this but look into it, their success and failure rates. Chose a team you have confidence in.

The audiologist is the person you have an ongoing relationship with so my advice there is trust them, do what they tell you to do.

Every time I have a new map I come away thinking that I don’t like it, that it will never work. I console myself with the idea that as Amy has left the previous map on my CI I can use that one if the new one doesn’t work but usually after an hour or so I’m used to the new one. If I switch back to the old one then it’s not so good.

Have some method of measuring your progress that isn’t numbers and scores from your CI clinic visits. Mine is a piece of music. Before I was implanted I used to listen to Holst’s The Planets  in my car. I couldn’t hear much of it but my brain would remember the music from when I could hear and so fill in the gaps. The day of switch on I listened to this in the car on the way home and was so surprised that I could hear more so soon. Now after each mapping session I listen to this on my drive home and can hear just how much my hearing has improved. It’s a wonderfully encouraging thing to do.

I’ve been to performances of the Planet Suite and have never been able to hear the  chorus on the Neptune The Mystic piece, even back in the day before I was diagnosed with a hearing loss. The chorus is hidden off stage so as I didn’t hear them I didn’t even know that they were there. Duh. Anyway, now I can. Here it is.

And Jupiter the Bringer of Jollity. This is the louder piece that I could hear before hearing loss and, in my memory, after. Stirring stuff especially if you are British

Anyway I digress. Pick a piece of music and listen to it on the same music machine in the same conditions. Mine was playing it in the car on the way back from my appointment.