a more silent world

I've gone back for my second mapping.  I had a moderately long wish list and we got through everything. I cannot stress enough how vitally important it is to understand how cochlear implants work, and what the tunable parameters are, and what each one does.  It makes far better use of our limited time together if I can convey what I need in "audiologist language". First, I wanted my favorite program in slot 1.  No brainer.  HiRes 120, Clear Voice medium, IDR set to 60, using tmic only. So next, we had to kill the RF lock issue I was having due to my thick skin flap and some residual swelling.  We did this by overriding the automatic RF power.  We made two copies of my favorite program, and set the RF power to 8 on one, and 12 on another.  SoundWave estimates I will get 7 hours from the large batteries on level 12 instead of 22 hours on automatic.  OUCH.  But it's better than dropping RF lock all day long. Finally I wanted one copy of ...

Well activation day was today.  I've got to admit, there may have actually been more excitement and anxiety than with the surgery date itself.  At the end of the day there's good news and bad news, but almost all good news. First, the bad news.  I sat down in my audiologist's office and we assembled the Naida's, hooked them to her computer, and SoundWave recognized the processor right away, but sat there searching endlessly for the implant.  We swapped processors, cables, head pieces, everything.  Searching never ends, and implant is never found.  This feeling strongly resembles flying by a cop at 90 mph.  Sinking, nauseous, kill-me-now feeling. The surgeon had said the skin flap was *very* thick, so I already knew this was a possibility, but hoped I wouldn't be in some tiny minority.  Can I at least win the lottery?  Now there's a minority we all would like to become a part of!  Not going through a surgery to discover that the compu...