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...

Lots and lots of healing.  The body is a pretty amazing piece of work.  I had a noticeable amount of swelling on the CI side of my face yesterday (day 2).  I don't really need any pain meds anymore--it just feels like a long-lived headache now.  I still can't chew properly because it seems the jaw muscles are very much connected to the muscles near the temple, and that region hurts like a bitch when I try to chew anything beyond yogurt/pudding.  Also the swelling in the ear area seems to be where a lot of the jaw action takes place, and that isn't pleasant either... So day one was almost all sleep.  Day two, I was awake for roughly 5-6 hours total.  Today I have been awake for over 4 hours and still not drained. All in all, I'm in surprisingly good shape.  Can't wait to feel completely normal again.  I feel the knock of boredom coming really soon.

I had my surgery yesterday and got implanted with the Advanced Bionics mid-scala electrode. Surgery took about two hours, and pain in recovery was bad the first hour and I just felt miserable for a couple hours after that. I got home 6 hours after surgery ended and felt reasonably good by managing pain with Percocets. I'm not a back sleeper, so trying to sleep was a bit of a challenge. I slept mostly on my side and tried some on my stomach, but pain kept waking me.  This morning I still feel okay with pain meds. I have to take off the compression bandage today so more to come. 

I'm trying to file a captioning complaint at the official FCC website and every single link is broken.  To say I am pissed off is an understatement.  Screw you FCC! http://www.fcc.gov/accessibility-complaints-form-2000c Thanks for nothing.

I've been messing around quite a bit with a Javascript framework graphing toolset called HighCharts. I tweaked it to graph my past and current audiograms and you can see the output here: Here is a link to the HTML: http://theunixguys.com/audiogram.html Feel free to look at the source and use it as a template to graph your own.  It is just static HTML and you just need to customize the values.

Last week I dropped into full silence on one side.  But let's take a look back first... I've been losing my hearing now for 35 years.  It has been a slow and steady loss; the kind that goes unnoticed over weeks and even many months.  But over the years it has been like becoming a senior citizen many times over.  A cycle in which I must realize (or more accurately, admit to myself) that I have lost an appreciable amount of hearing and I either need to have my hearing aids adjusted or replaced.  A cycle that requires me to "learn" how to hear again because, after getting the aids adjusted or replaced, my world sounds drastically different than it did the day before. My first cycle occurred in my mid-twenties, as I entered the work force.  I realized in large meetings that I was missing an awful lot of what was being said by coworkers.  People, when they are not confident in what they are saying tend to be quieter, and well, some people just have smal...