Evaluation Process for CIs - Your experience?

For me the gibberish is continuing to resolve into sound. I would also say that the initial high frequency perception has moved lower so sounds sound more natural in pitch. Hopefully you’re doing the exercises and/or streaming stuff you’re familiar with to build those pathways up.

@phobos512 said:

Hopefully you’re doing the exercises and/or streaming stuff you’re familiar with to build those pathways up.

Thanks for your helpful post.

Yes, I am spending lots of time concentrating on listening to speech and understanding it. Mostly streaming TV on known shows or movies. Some reading out loud. That’s surprisingly good. Reading the Hearing Therapy Manual out loud.

Your Covid test is today if I remember correctly. That means you are just a few days away from your second implant. I hope all goes well for you.

Having the first implant under your belt should makes most worries or concerns be minimal.
Piece of cake!

Yep I’m actually in a room at my surgeon’s and audiologist’s office now for pre-op paperwork and COVID test. Paperwork is done; just waiting on my doc. Pretty busy here today; my usual appointment time is 0730 but today it’s 1045. Not used to other patients being here.

At least traffic was good and it was still warm enough to put the top down.

@Raudrive I only have one map (I need more) and I fully maxed out on volume.

Thanks for that information. Your max is 150. Mine is 165. I wonder what that really means. I have one program and no treble bass control. He said I need to be patient about more programs.

I asked the audiologist when he was setting things up if mine was loud. He said no. I was thinking gain like hearing aids.

@Raudrive I need to go back and get more maps to give me more flexibility with volume. It’s a long day on public transport. But I need to get my act together.

Your treble and bass control need to be activated by your Aud. Ask at your next appointment. Do you have forward focus? Sensitivity? Telecoil? Mine were activated progressively with each mapping. I only got master volume, bass, and treble at the 15 month mark when I ditched the EAS attachment.

Whoa that is a great improvement! Good boy, that brain of yours

Thanks,
A week ago I couldn’t understand my wife at all. Now it’s much better.

What I am seeing is it just takes some time and exposure to speech, paying attention to words.
It’s more like hearing aids than I expected. Similar to having bad hearing for years and having to learn speech again. Very much like I dealt with when getting aggressive with frequency lowering technology after losing speech recognition. New sounds and learning to understand them.

The CI sound is computer or robotic sounding at this time. The bass is getting better and better. Bass was not even there at first. Mid range is trying to get clearer and trebles are slowly clearing. I hear birds that I haven’t heard in many years, that includes using frequency lowering technology.

So yes, the CI is pretty amazing. We are all different when it comes to hearing. Everything we talk about concerning hearing aids applies to cochlear implants too. It takes time for the brain to learn new sounds and how to deal with them. Can’t be a quitter.

I’m so happy to hear all of this!

Brain is amazing.
I noticed that I got even better comprehension with my aids now, as compared to when I started in april/may, or rechecked in august. Maybe wrs itself wouldn’t be higher, but I definitely understand more of that streaming in my ear. Although, not all youtube channels are equally understandable, so I guess it definitely depends on how good their mics are and what processing they did before uploading.

I had an impression that CI is a feeling close to that we get when streaming with aids, that ‘it’s all here in front of your nose’, how off am I?

I watched some YouTube when they asked single side deaf people who got CI to show what they hear, how it sounds. It’s definitely robotic but clear, not distorted. Mine with aids is really distorted, which really skews the comprehension. If it gets worse, CI would be big improvement over what I have now. But brain is awesome, since it can extract information even with all that garbage around it.

Glad you can hear the birds again I think birds are one big milestone

@Dani said:

In my case it is not robotic, not at all - now.
It had sounded robotic before my audiologist adjusted the centre frequency of each electrode to where I really hear that specific frequency. From that day on voices have “sound”.

Awesome!

I found the video

Channel has 2 more about experience from different users. But they didn’t tell us details about the users, mappings more anything else.

@Dani
“Is there a correlation between increasing number of CI users and decreasing bird population? ”

Your getting a bit cheeky young man. It’s Spring downunder and the bird population is increasing twofold with The amount of all the young chicks squawking!

Update on Cochlear Nucleus 7/ Kanso 2 exchange.

After a couple emails and an on-line chat with Cochlear the exchange order has gone through. They are saying about 2 weeks to receive because of the very high demand for the Kanso 2. Appears there are lots of people doing the exchange.

Again I can’t say enough good things about this company. Cochlear has been very helpful and understanding about everything.

@Raudrive I will be very interested in your experience with the Kanso2. As I’m due for an upgrade in 18 months time, my health insurance allows me an upgrade every 3 years. Since I’ve gone fully electric I have security issues, even though I have a snug fit attached. The N7 still falls off several times a day. The only reason I didn’t get the original Kanso was it didn’t have BT therefore no bimodal connection to the HA. I will be looking forward to hearing about your experiences with this devise.