I'm a greedy little audiophile.

My fourth mapping was yesterday and I have "Advanced." I dig this snazzy music program over my base program. I love the wider dynamic range and voices sound pretty. Voices jump out at me in noise, in the car, in quiet, you get the idea. Oh, music sounds pretty good too. :) I’m very greedy as far as sounds go. I like it and want it all and I want it now! In the beginning, my audi stuck me in the booth did a tone, sentence and word test. I scored 44% on my sentences compared to 0% pre-activation. The word tests, lets just say I need some work LOL, 8% :) but compare that 0% pre activation, it is a leaps and bounds. She said that they don't normally run tests until 3 months after activation. Regardless, I'm ecstatic with the results! From just two weeks ago, there is already an improvement!

Pink represents the tone test I just had done yesterday.
Red represents my left ear prior to being implanted.
Blue represents my right ear without my hearing aid.
Green represent normal hearing

Since I liked the IDR of 80 and the music program, she tweaked the music program and added higher frequencies to it to become my base program. Now paper and plastic are back to being loud again :) She went through some sentences covering her mouth and I got every single one with the high frequency emphasis. She lowered the volume to 306 to eliminate the twitch. At my last mapping, she went through each electrode raising the volume to see if it was one electrode, not the case. The conclusion is that it might be a combination of electrodes that are giving me the 'oh so sexy spastic eye look'. I did the math the combinations are endless. She programmed the CI along with my hearing aid in to see if I need the volume in my left ear and so far, it is working out well. If I take either the CI or the HA off, everything sounds soft. Perhaps my brain is getting use to having two ears again. Next time I go and see her is when an Advanced Bionic audiologist will be present which is going to be within the next two-three weeks. Once I find out when the audiologist is available, I will let you all know.

Overall, this nifty little gadget impresses me every single day. This weekend I was cleaning out the shed and then I heard two DISTINCT MALE voices or two baritone females, you never know. Lo and behold, there were two men hanging out on the roof of my neighbor's house that is a good 80 feet away. Before I couldn't hear anything that was 8 feet away much less 80 feet.

On the way home armed with a new map, I wanted to stop by a mall that is close to the hospital. Since someone neglected to grab the GPS at home and I had no idea how to get there from Philadelphia. Hell I didn't even know how to get there from Jersey. Thanks to the trusty GPS technology installed on my phone, it guided me right to the front entrance of the mall. From there I entered the golden palace of make-up otherwise known as Sephora. I am walking around practically convulsing with excitement at all the different products, I hear behind me, "May I help you look for something?" I felt like I had an Elvis moment because my eyebrow must have went up in a permanent state of perpetual surprise. I turned around and there was a very happy Sephora employee smiling waiting to assist me. It is so much easier to shop without purposely avoiding communication with anyone.

Signing off as the greedy audiophile.

CHECK THIS OUT!!!!

A picture is worth a thousand words and quite frankly I am too tired to come up with a thousand words. My third mapping went great and I will post a blog about it when I am able to keep both eyes open at the same time. Jennifer my audi decided to do a tone test in the sound booth and this is the results of it :)

Green represent normal hearing.
Pink represents the tone test I just had done today.
Red represents my left ear prior to being implanted.
Blue represents my right ear as is.

I sat outside of the hospital waiting for my car staring at the audiogram waiting for the letters to magically start dancing. I'm surprised I was able to blink! It was definitely a perk me up from the slap in the face that the Yankees didn't win the playoffs this year. :(

Hate to cut this short, hearing rain on roof for the first time, will post tomorrow!!

A picture is worth a thousand words.

I am hoping to write this under a thousand words.

Ladies and gentleman, this is an Audiogram or a hearing test. On the top, you will see Frequency in Cycles per Second (HZ), and on the left side you will see Hearing Level in Decibels (db). What the heck does that mean?! I'm going to tell you without boring you.

Hertz or HZ represents the different pitches of sound. The lower the number, the more bass the sound has. The higher the number, the more treble the sound has. Decibels or db is the volume which the lower the number, the softer the sound, the higher the number, the louder the sound. The picture shows different sounds and where they fall on this graph. You can see that human speech is in the range of 50db and above.

The GREEN line represents normal hearing. Anything below that green line a person with normal hearing can hear.

The BLUE line represents my right ear. The only sounds I can hear are below that line. With a hearing aid, I can get up to 50db but with very little speech discrimination.

The RED line represents my left ear and anything below that I can hear, somewhat. You see that red line goes flat at about 1050Hz and up which means I did not hear anything at volume of 120db which from what I am told is mighty loud.

The rest of this entry is more technical and probably will bore some of you but my fellow geeks will find it interesting to say the least. I want to be able to refer back to it monitor any changes when I get the implant.

Pure tone measures without hearing aids for my left ear are:
95db at 250Hz
105db at 500Hz
110db at 1000Hz
115db at 1050Hz
No response at 2000Hz and up.

Right ear:
90 db at 250Hz
95db at 500Hz
100db at 1000Hz and 2000Hz
95db at 3000Hz
100db at 4000Hz
95db at 6000Hz
90db at 8000Hz

Speech discrimination with a hearing aid for my left ear was 0% in quiet, and +10 noise and +5 noise
For my right ear with my trusty hearing aid in was:
Sentences in quiet was 30%
Words 6%
Phonemes are 30%.

With hearing aids in both ears ranged from 35-42%