Cochlear Implant Update - August 19, 2021

 Rabbi Jim’s Update

I’m writing this week from the ferry to Nantucket--and excited that I’ll have a weekend with friends (and Rosie and Puck) nearby in a peaceful place. This week also marks a milestone for me--a month has passed since I received my cochlear implant transmitter. I already knew from my own experience that the implant has made a difference in my life. Most of that difference is good: I am more aware of my surroundings and I can pick up that people are talking to me (even if I still need to ask them to repeat themselves). Some of that difference is a bit challenging: certain sounds are jarring and can dominate my attention if they are persistent (especially hissing or whistling). 

But this week, I went to my “tune up” appointment, where I underwent audiology tests for the first time since the surgery. The first test involved identifying individual words out of context; the speaker, who sounded like a refugee from a fifties anti-marajuana movie, would say “Ready” and then a word. Over the course of fifty items, I found that entire words are still a challenge, but the result was even worse than I thought: I identified only 8 of the fifty. On the other hand, I did have success in hearing individual phonemes (the sound parts of words), identifying at least one in about three-quarters of the words. That, at least, felt like progress (especially since before the implant I could identify neither whole words nor individual phonemes).

The second test was more successful. Amid a confusing hubbub of “cocktail party chatter,” I was asked to repeat the sentences that I would hear. Of those, I picked up about 50% of the words, most of the time in the context of a phrase or sentence: the context proved to be crucial for my brain to extrapolate from imperfect hearing to reasonable (but certainly not perfect) comprehension.

Despite these exciting results, it’s even more exciting that it’s still only a month into the experiment--I hope it will continue to improve...