Mapping

This week I had another mapping. Its been a year and a half since my second Medel implant. From the previous tests it seemed the right ear was not performing quite as well as my left. That was surprising since my right ear had been my stronger ear. After the single word test however the right ear scored 70% and the left ear 48%. My audio said my left ear wasn’t catching the soft sounds of the consonants, always the harder ones for hearing challenged folks. That however was at 10 DBL below the last test 6 months ago. So, the score looks bad but it is because it was at a lower volume. So my audie went to work on my processor and had me back and forth in the booth about four times. I could tell she was really working hard and impressed with her interest in booting me up more. Ultimately she did improve my hearing score in the left side by boosting some of the settings in the processor.

She wanted to impress on me that she has few patients that score 100% on sentences like I do so I’m still doing really well. She even called me her Superstar! The trend in testing now is to push folks scores in those lower DBL volumes. The single word tests are hard for me and I want to yell at her to turn the darn volume up. So many of the words are challenging while the sentences are easier to put into context.

Over all a good visit and I’m lucky to have such a conscientious  audiologist.

Honor Roll

I really feel like I made the honor roll yesterday! I went in for my two week visit and my audiologist decided to test me for sentence recognition. First we played with adjustments. The newly implanted ear is still higher pitched than the other ear so we tried adding some bass to it. It gave it more resonance in sound but I still have the original and another setting to play with. We went into the booth to try sentence recognition. My previous score with just my right aided ear was 15%. With my newly implanted ear alone I scored 83%. She even asked me if I had my other hearing implant on but I didn’t. My last sentence test with the left implanted ear was 79% so I’m wondering how that all happened so fast. I was able to use the telephone on my new ear too today but it needs more volume. Never the less I could hear what they were saying.

Three Month Mapping

I took this photo in Ga in front of an old feed store. They had cages of roosters and chickens. Anyway, I had another mapping today. The results seem to be pretty much the same as my last mapping. She told me she wasn’t going to give me the easy tests like Hints because I had already gotten a 90%. The sentence test was fairly complicated, male and female voices with sentences unrelated to each other. Some voices were easier than others as in real life. My score was the same, 72%. The word test where the man says, Ready and then the word Ready, and then the word (for about 50 words) also showed the same results. I didn’t do that well, I think about 36% but 65% in sound recognition. I told her the volume was low and she said she was trying to make it hard. She said, “I could make the volume louder and you would feel great but that wouldn’t really replicate real listening situations.” I’m going to try to make an audiogram with my before implant and after results.

I’m still happy with my implant. I pushed myself to increase the volume today but obviously it didn’t improve my scores. We’ll see in 3 months when I go back if the volume increase helps any.

Yesterday I wen…

Yesterday I went in for my third mapping. Basically it was the same as last time but my audiologist gave me some more tests. She said my choice of volume is pretty much the same as last time so I don’t think she turned any up the electrodes up more though I went in thinking I was ready for more volume. The simple sentence test improved from 82% to 90%. Before my implant my bad ear got 12% w/aid and together w/aid both ears got 56%. The more challenging sentences improved from 46% from last time to 71% yesterday. The last test was 50 words. The voice said ready….and a word, ready……and a word. It ran fairly quickly so if I hesitated he was already up to the next word. This one I only got 19 words out of 50 but got 63% of the sounds. That was just with my implanted ear. 

The last test was a bit disappointing but she believes I’ll keep getting better. She also told me to start using my hearing aid now in my right ear. 

That’s the update. I still am really happy with my implant even if I never reach 100% because I could’t understand any speech before. Now my implanted ear sounds better than my hearing aid ear. Its a success story!