I can tell by the way you walk

I just had two moments of hearing that I've missed in the past several months. While I'm not yet used to the way my cochlear implant sounds, I'm starting to recognize some things.

I had it turned on this morning, my appointment set for 9:30. Dana, my audiologist, called me into her office and sat me down, where she promptly hooked my head up to the speech processor. First things first: getting my map set up. MAP doesn't stand for anything, they just call it a map for some reason. Thus the lower case. She tested out the electrodes and told me to count the amount of beeps I was hearing (i.e. one, three, two, four, etc) at different pitches starting with low. At first, I was afraid my implant wasn't working because I wasn't hearing anything, but then I started hearing beeps, only, how to describe, they weren't exactly beeps but feelings.

By "feelings" I mean physical sensations. Like the bass of a drum, but only in my brain.

After that, which was pretty tame, since I was hooked up to a computer and hearing silence except for quiet beeps, Dana turned the processor on so that I could hear real sounds like speech, and my mom started talking to me. I should be honest, it's not easy for me to understand speech through my processor yet, but I will eventually come to recognize exactly what the sounds are, because it sounded at first like a timpani. Yes, a timpani. A kettle drum. Or a whole bunch of them, and it still kind of does.

The first sound I was truly able to recognize was the clicking of my cell phone keys as I typed a message for my roommate. Then, the sound of feet walking on pavement. Right now, I can hear the keys on my computer as I'm typing. They click. A minute ago, I heard the kitchen alarm go off as I'm baking some cookies.

Hmm, being able to hear. Weird.

activation, scars, everything

So that is what my head looked like when I took the turban off. A really nifty cut with internal stitches.

I stayed home for a few days, told a boy that he was lame, took a lot of vicodin, slept a lot, read a lot, watched movies. And then I went back to work and weaned myself off of the vicodin.

My incision is healing pretty cleanly. For some reason, it hurts tonight. I couldn't tell you why.

I got interviewed.

I set up a date for turning on my implant. I'll let you know how that goes.

After the Fact

I got my surgery.

I got a little scared ahead of time (a few days ahead) and then when I realized it was about a half hour away, I saw that I had nothing to fear: I would not be awake, and therefore, to me, it would be done in a snap.

I was given an IV and various types of anesthesia- I have a bruise where that is, a bruise on my chest (mystery bruise), and one on my lip (also another mystery bruise). My head hurts, but only in a spot I wasn't really expecting, having probably something to do with the angle of my neck during surgery. I've got a prescription for vicodin, some of which I've taken because as the day goes on and the original anesthesia wears off, the less nice my head feels, though to say it feels bad is kind of untrue. Just the one spot hurts.

Here's a photo of my bandage- the quality is poor since I took it on my phone, but better than nothing, right?


I get to take that off tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will take a photo of the bald spot and stitches! I can't wait to get this baby activated.