Sixth mapping and Blog Awards!

I’m shuffling back up the hallway to get to the kitchen and glide past the TV and all of the sudden I hear…

“Oh! They love having their tongue stroked.”

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech! I came to a complete halt. Did I hear that right? The words love, tongue, stroked with an inaudible period at the end. I couldn’t fathom what kind of kinky programming my sweet mother was watching. I pivoted on my foot anticipating images of smut.

*siggggggggggh*

What a relief, my mother wasn’t watching porn, it was the movie, Free Willy!

Now that I have your attention, I can bore you with the details of my latest mapping :) As I pointed out in my last mapping, I was shipped out with one processor with AGC on and the other one with it off. AGC stands for auto gain compression, which compresses loud sounds. For example, the sirens of an ambulance would drown all other noises out but with AGC enabled on a CI, it compresses the siren to a moderate listening level while being able to hear noises around you. With AGC off, it sounds like a siren, intense and loud. I was *suppose* to compare between the two but I was under the impression that the processor I was wearing had AGC on and it turns out that was not true, it had AGC off.

*whoops*

Anyway, I heard a lot of white noise even in quiet situations, like a bathroom, a closet, and then the soundproof booth! Therefore, what my dear sweet Audi, Jennifer, did was lowered my IDR from 80 to 60 and that seemed to eliminate the white noise. What is IDR you ask? IDR stands for Input Dynamic Range. It is adjustable configuration that widens or narrows the window of sound that the processor that picks up sound. If you have the default setting of 60, it means that you have a standard window of sound open that the processor will capture. If you raise it to the maximum of 80, that means the processor will be more sensitive to sound. I found out the hard way bigger is not always better. I have been wearing my AGC ON processor that is labeled with a white stamp :) and I’ve noticed with the IDR back down at 60, I essentially hear the same sounds but much cleaner.

I had another issue with men voices. Men sound like masculine robots and damn if I can understand them. Jennifer managed to find a man to come and talk to me about his nice pressed shirt that he received a couple weeks ago while she applied some high frequency gains until his voice changed. I only met with him for a couple minutes and I already had an idea of what he sounded like when he was going through puberty with all the adjustments made.

Now for tasty tidbit of the night, my speech comprehension scores, but let me do a little review here.

Pre-CI
HINT Sentences in Quiet:	0%
HINT Sentences in Noise +10:	0%
Words:	0%
Phonemes:	0%
One month after activation
HINT Sentences in Quiet:	44%
HINT Sentences in Noise +10:	N/A
Words:	8%
Phonemes:	335
AND NOW Five months after activation
HINT Sentences in Quiet:	71%
Second list HINT Sentences in Quiet:	86%
HINT Sentences in Noise +10:	30%
Second list HINT Sentences in Noise +10:	37%
Words:	26%
Phonemes:	49%

Boo-yah! It definitely working here folks. It is working so well that it has surpassed my right ear that I wear a HA in. With that being said, I have decided that I am going to go get my other ear done but I am going to wait until next year.

I want to give out some shout outs to a couple bloggers that just had their CI surgery, Sheila and Ruminator. They are both doing fantastic with their recovery!

I want to give special thanks to KW over at Living the Questions gave me a Treasured Blog Award. I have been captivated with reading her blog because she is so genuinely kindhearted and mentally titillating that you cannot help but feel at home at her blog.

I want to give Jim over at Jim’s DEEP THOUGHTS, and deep thoughts they are indeed, a special thanks for giving me an Excellent Blog Award. I just started reading Jim’s blog religiously a couple weeks and I’m totally hooked on him! Allow me to quote him from one of his posts:

“I am not totally deaf therefore, I am not really part of the "Deaf" culture even though I want to be. But, I can't force myself to be part of the Deaf culture. I accepted the Deaf culture. The key issues is this: I want the Deaf culture to accept me as I am. Just as a person who has disabilities who wanted to be accepted as part of the society.”

He read my mind in more ways then one. Go check him out for more of his common sense, deep thought provoking posts, you will not be disappointed.

I will be giving out the Treasured and Excellent blog awards to some other lucky bloggers next week, stay tuned!

Now, I must put some good relaxation techniques that I learned in Staples to good use, shredding! G'night all!