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Advanced Bionics CI Activation a Success

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Hi all. Thanks for the great input over the last year while I decided whether to move forward with a Cochlear Implant. My left side hearing was a steep ski slope and I was a borderline candidate at about 40% speech understanding. I decided to take the step now vs. later. I am 60 years old, in good health, still working in a job that requires verbal communication, and my “good ear” is not that great. I worried that if my “good ear” tanked quickly like my left ear did two years ago, I would be unable to work.

I chose Advanced Bionics brand with the Marvel Link Phonak hearing aid for my “good ear”. I got my new the day of surgery at Vanderbilt on 11.29.22 and am very pleased with the improvement over my five year old Oticon OPN 1 aids. I was activated two days ago on 12.16.22.

My general feeling at this early point is I have no regrets. I can understand voices although they all sound like Darth Vader. It is amusing, and should normalize with time. I streamed a book I just finished to just my and was able to understand every word. My son is an operatic tenor, so I created a playlist of opera arias to listen to the months before surgery so they would be familiar. I tried it today with both ears streaming and am happy to say it was better than I expected. I feel I hear more variety of pitches with the music than with voices at this point. It is certainly different, but I can glimpse how brain plasticity will normalize it over time. I was expecting it to be horrible, so this is all good:)

I am pleased with this as a starting point, and know it will be baby steps over time to an even better result. I think that having residual hearing prior to surgery likely is helpful. Not much was retained post surgery, some may come back in a month or two, but at this point it simplifies matters in that I won’t have to use the acoustic ear piece on my CI.

One thing that I feel may be challenging my speech understanding is that I sense a very slight delay between my hearing aid and the CI. I am told this will settle as will the sense of echo. I wonder if the slight delay is adjustable? I guess I’ll find out at my next mapping. Thanks for the help along the way - I’m sure I will continue to need more!

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Congratulations

It sure sounds like you are doing fantastic. Understanding speech that quickly is really nice.

How do you like the hands free phone call? I do miss that with Cochlear.

Hope you get that delay figured out. It’s really important concerning directionality.

Gosh, hands free is super cool, although I keep forgetting to answer by pressing on my rather than my phone.

Directionality…yes. I work at a food bank doing volunteer and development coordination. We have a huge warehouse and I keep thinking the forklift beeps are in the other section rather than coming at me. But I had that with my HAs a bit anyway.

In reply to @joanhawsey

@joanhawsey said:

One thing that I feel may be challenging my speech understanding is that I sense a very slight delay between my hearing aid and the CI. I am told this will settle as will the sense of echo. I wonder if the slight delay is adjustable? I guess I’ll find out at my next mapping. Thanks for the help along the way - I’m sure I will continue to need more!

There is a slight delay. you will get used to it. I notice it when i am switching brand of hearing aid but it goes away after like 1 minutes…

Joan you are off to an amazing start on your hearing journey. Congratulations :tada: I don’t know what you have been told with , when I was activated I was told to improve the speech understanding to spend some time each day just streaming to your processor and not . Doing that improve my comprehension dramatically within the first month.
Good luck on your journey Joan.

Thanks Sheryl - I can see how that would be super helpful. I did that last night for a bit. My recommended only rehab for an hour, 4-5 times a week or so, which surprised me at being so little.

a year, you will notice that things sound the same as your brain rewires itself. i can only tell there is no bass in my music since my sound processor starts at 188 hz so i hear none of the bass freq. The high frequencies are night and day different on music , speech understanding. triumph that. My hearing in my left non CI ear is 80% and i can tell you that they merge very effectively , i’m doing extremely well in noise and My CI is 80%, 96% bimodal noise test was 70% (Oticon dynamo and n7)

…4 years, upgraded from N7 so N8, and oticon dynamo/resound quattro to resound omnia. it is turned me into a hearing person that more than what i asked for in my CI

I have the Marvel Ci with Link . I have the same feeling about having a delay between the two. That is very noticable when in noise/ more people speaking. In quiet face to face it is very good, but more distance or extra noise it is terrible. I have it now a year and a half. AB has no adjusting for the delay, the audi in the hospital told me there is another make that has that. And told me more customers had complained about it. Using the Roger On helps not always ut in some situations, best to shift the remote so it does not use the mics on the ci/ha, only the Roger ones

Sorry to hear about that.
Is there a delay while streaming?
It’s almost like some kind of noise reduction setting in your In Loud Noise hearing aid pogram.

Good luck with this.

Also sorry to hear that it hasn’t resolved for you. I am much less aware of it a month later, but agree it might be more noticeable in group situations. The trickling water background sound is much less intrusive now - I barely notice it and sometimes it disappears. Progress. I’m at the highest progressive level set at activation and have my first mapping on Wednesday. Curious if anything will be changed other than more volume .

In reply to @Raudrive

Streaming works the best for understanding voice, there are no acoustics involved. Teams meetings go very well. Better than the same group of 8 people live in a meeting room. Taking the Link M out makes it sometimes also better.

It feels like latency between Ci and . It’s not adjustable in the or HA software. I have the Phonak Target software for the HA, there is nothing to adjust related to timing. Streaming doesn’t give the feel that there is a timing problem.

I am having the issue with n7/n8, and resound Quattro/Omnia using the Android protocol but not on MFI protocol on iOS or the resound/Cochlear streaming HW… I think LE audio will fix this completely…

Thanks All. Yes it is not an issue when streaming. I detected the delay at activation right away. I sort of thought the connection between the Phonak Marvel Link and would do that better because they are “linked”. Now I am hoping that increased volume on the CI will help. The “reverb” I hear in what I think are higher frequencies - maybe the consonant sounds - will need to be calmed if volume is increased. Hoping that is possible. Can anyone tell me what to expect of the first mapping? I don’t have a clue.

I heard nothing in the first time i was mapped, just low frequency sound audible, that about it, my understanding is what the first time you are mapped, they start with the default and then they do more tweaking in the second round, that what happened to me… it sound like the audiologist need to adjust the pulse per second (PPS) parameters of your processor.

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