Thursday 27th March 2008 - trying out the FM system

I felt so tired this morning that I didn’t really want my cochlear implant in this morning as the sounds was a little too much. I think I was picking up too much meaningless background noise. I mentioned to a colleague about too much background noise cos I am in an open plan office, so for a while I then took it off for a bit during the morning and then later on I put it back on again. When I put it back on again my colleague and I thought it was a good idea to connect it to the FM system so reduce the background noise in the hope I would be less tired. We thought connecting the implant to the FM system was a good idea. It was better, less background noise and made concentration to lipreading better and easier even though I can't pick up everything that is said, I still need to lip-read and use BSL. I continued to have the implant connected to the FM for the rest of the day. My colleague then told me that my speech that my diction was clearer in my speech. I was not aware of this. So that was good news. Then at lunchtime, another colleague was telling me the same thing. Something must be happening.

Tonight at home I had the washing machine on and I could hear the detail of the sounds coming from that so I could tell what the machine was doing with the washing. I can also hear my microwave but I haven’t noticed any “ping” noises yet.

I realised that my brain is currently at the stage where it is hearing sounds as a sound, but I find these sounds difficult to identify or distinguish. I get feeling that will be the next job my brain will do once it has learnt to translate the sound signals into a proper sound.