An old friend of mine contacted me a couple months ago about CI.
Today he and his wife came by to visit, haven’t seen him in probably 15-20 years.
He wears the Cochlear Nucleus 7 on one ear, was activated about 5 weeks ago. At activation he had almost 20% word understanding, pretty amazing. At his 4 week mappings he learned his word understanding has not improved much. He wanted to talk to me about this.
As it turns out he has not been doing his rehabilitation with his CI like he should. He actually takes the processor off at times due to frustration and just uses his hearing aided ear.
As it turns out he had not been told how important rehabilitation is by his audiologist. He also has not been educated about how to use the Cochlear Nucleus app. to help improve his speech understanding.
We talked about different ways to practice hearing with the new CI that may help him. His wife got involved with this conversation and whole heartedly wants to help. I suspect his hearing will improve dramatically improve with just a little practice.
After reading about different members here on the forum mostly having great luck with CI but then a few not so much I thought about sharing this experience my friend is having with his new CI. Hopefully it will help someone understand how important rehabilitation is for improved speech understanding.