Hello Raudrive and hello to everyone here. I have just registered here a few minutes ago.
I find your reply very encouraging because i only got activated 5 days ago (Nucleus 7 on trial) and I’m going near beserk with worry because i can’t understand anything. I keep asking myself what i got myself into. All i hear is high pitched noise and the words that come through are difficult to understand and overshadowed by the high tones. Then there is the problem that my own voice comes back to me as echo. Are all these normal at the beginning?
I will appreciate any tips on how to get along.
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Out of curiosity, did no one talk to your about what to expect and the period of rehabilitation? Or is it just that now that you are in it it is hard to not be anxious even though it was discussed? I’m interested in what sorts of information people get before they make the choice to go ahead versus the real experience of doing it, and whether there are big differences in how different places prepare people.
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Welcome to the forum.
Have you looked in the Cochlear Implant section of the forum? Lots of information and experience from members who got CI.
Your description sounds a lot like my first implant. All I heard was scratching and screeching and noise like a static.
It took about 6 weeks for any sort of sound to make any sense. The low frequency sounds were the first thing I could understand anything.
Once things started making a little sense the pace of understanding increased. At 2-2.5 months I could hold a conversation on.the phone with the CI only.
There were times that first month or so that I was very frustrated.
Hang in there. Find ways to hear speech that you should understand. Is this a single sided hearing loss?
Thank you. Your description is exactly what I’m passing through, mostly the static and screeching noise that overshadow every other sound. Then the echo is also a real pain and frustrating.
I am profoundly hard at hearing on both ears but had the CI surgery on the right ear which is worse than the left. So I’m still using a starkey HA on my left which is being a big help in hearing at this moment.
Like I said at the beginning, yesterday was my first day here and I sure will navigate through the site.
Oh, and I live in Germany.
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Well, I was informed that it’s going to be tough and that it was going to be months or possibly years before things get better. But no one could actually explain to me or rather accurately convey to me what I’m currently experiencing. I guess this has to do with the fact that the experiences are different. What I’m doing here is just to describe mine and hope someone have had something similar and advice on what to expect down the line. I was worried because I’ve read about people who said they got along pretty much right after the op. This is a far cry from mine.
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@Zonas welcome to the forum. Hearing through a CI is so totally different to a hearing aid. Your brain has to lay down new sound pathways. And all these high pitched sounds, squeaks and squarks are doing just that. It’s not your ear that is hearing it’s your brain that’s interpreting the sounds.
If you have only been activated 5 days you won’t have had your first mapping yet. Every mapping appointment will bring words a lot clearer for you. So try not to miss any mapping appointments. Don’t be discouraged, do lots of rehab streaming audiobooks, podcasts and music, anything you can get your hands on to stream. Even though you can’t interpret words just yet keep doing it. Music is a tough one again, you have to train your brain to be able to appreciate music again. Download “Bring back the beat” it’s boring as all get out but it will help. I listened to the radio most of the day. Do you have a resound hearing aid for your other ear yet? I was made to wait 8 weeks. You will go through several assessments before the end of you 1st year. You will find this forum is a great place for info from other users. Start your own page and please keep us updated on your progress… Everyone’s hearing journey is very different on when they can understand what’s being said. I could understand words at activation but it took until after my 1st mapping that I understood without having to concentrate.
No one told me what to expect or explained how the CI works with the brain doing all the interpreting of the sounds. I did get told “to stream lots of podcasts” as rehab from my AuD. Another CI user told me about the local library app to stream audiobooks free. The only other thing I got told was my AuD said they could give me a maximum of 60% better hearing. Anything would have been better than 26%. Even at activation I wasn’t shown/told how to do any of the maintenance required either. It’s been a hell of a huge learning curve with an I’ll fitting N7.
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This is huge for me. Thank you so much for all the information and encouragement.
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Interesting. Where I am I think patients are typically advised to leave their hearing aid out as much as possible for a period of time after activation (4-8 weeks) to force the brain to work on interpretting the CI input. They are also provided with some listening rehab exercises.
From what I’ve seen from users on this forum, individuals who had good success worked hard on the rehab using a variety of approaches to actively listen for hours a day after activation: Podcasts, reading along with audiobooks, having loved ones read or talk to them and repeating back what they heard and getting correction, watching TV and reading captions and listening in a focussed way, dedicated auditory training programs. It would be interesting to compile together all the activities that CI users felt were valuable. Probably also good to have a lot of options, because for anyone to do anything for hours a day you need to at least enjoy it a little.
edit: I wonder whether it would be more effective to progress from very familiar to unfamiliar materials. Say for example there is a poem that you know really well–this would have a strong neural representation and it would be a matter of connecting up the new input from the auditory nerve with the pre-existing template. It seems to me that this should just generally be easier for well-known audio, and then once that’s sounding more clear you can piggy-back other things more easily.
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This is not the case for me. I was told to do audio books, podcasts and a couple phone apps and never told to remove the hearing aid from the non implanted side.
Within a week of activation I took the hearing aid off and never put it back on. This turned out to be good for me.
I personally watched old TV shows I knew by heart using closed captioning while streaming the TV sound to the CI. This approach worked well for me as well.
@Dani is in Munich. He wears MedEl bilateral processors. Maybe he can get in this conversation too.
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