Tuesday 18th March 2008 - Tiring day

More progress have been made with the CI, but I am totally exhausted mentally as a result. I left the house this morning half an hour later as I found it incredibly difficult to get my brain awake – but surprisingly I still got to work for 9am!!

I was ok at work, managed to think this morning. Am picking up sound when someone is stirring cups of tea or coffee quite easily and seem to be able to recognise the sound. The only sounds I really heard were footsteps, sneezing (I think – was aware of something happening but not sure if I can identify this) and spoons stirring cups. This afternoon, I felt more and more tired and felt somewhat more irritable – I’m just so mentally tired as brain working extra hard to process and deal with these new sensations of sound. My Mum and some other professional staff did warn me that I will be totally mentally exhausted in the first few months – I didn’t believe them but actually they were right. I was also advised from several places / sources that as a result of profound deafness from birth and never heard speech in my life, I will still need to lip-read or use BSL (British Sign Language) to understand what people are saying, and that I should not get my hopes up too high on those, but I might get some but whatever I can get is a real bonus and everyone's experience is different. The real bonus I am getting here are environmental sounds as they come bit by bit. These new sounds confuse me at times and I really need people to tell me what they are, cos I don’t know what they are and this makes me feel annoyed if I don’t know what they are and hinders my listening development and I still can't follow speech. I just feel so down this afternoon – exhaustion, so tired, I just wanna cry cos so tired. Some people tell me that I should be happy I have a cochlear implant – I am happy I’ve got one, but I wish some more people would understand the extreme hard work that I am having to do as I process new sounds and that this is the most difficult stage as its early days my brain having to work extra hard to try and learn to hear.