4 Week Adjustment

Part of having an Esteem is getting adjustments pretty regularly.  I'm very fortunate to live a few hours from my surgeon/audiologist's office AND my audiologist does not follow a fixed schedule for adjustments, so they got me in for an adjustment really quickly.  The main reason was to (hopefully) fix the problems I'm having a church.  I guess I'll find out if that worked tomorrow. :)  The added bonus is that Megan (the wonderful audiologist) was able to add more volume.  Apparently I'm adjusting REALLY quickly and can tolerate a lot of volume.  I thought this was obvious given my occupation. :)  However, Megan told me she usually can't give this much volume for A YEAR after activation.  Mine was 4 weeks ago.  I am SO blessed!  I am definitely not using all of the volume now, but I can adjust it whenever I'm ready.  The Esteem has 3 settings which are different for everyone based on the type of hearing loss and severity of it.  Usually, one is for quiet conversation, one is for background noise and one is for phone or tv.  I have a remote (Personal Programmer) that I can use to change settings whenever I want.  However, I hate doing that so my goal is to find a program that works for every situation.  In fact, on any given day, I couldn't tell you what setting I have it on. :)  Each setting has (had, now) 6 volume levels (0-5). Apparently, yesterday it was on C5, which was the loudest setting at the time.  Since I was able to tolerate that, Megan added more volume to C and completely changed my A and B settings to try and eliminate background noise.  I *think* it's on A3 now.  A is not quieter than C, but it has less power at certain frequencies which should eliminate the echo and static at church.  We'll see. :)

The BEST news is that my pure tone average and speech reception threshold are now 25 dB - NORMAL!!!!  Granted, it's barely normal, but that didn't stop me from screaming, "Are you freaking kidding me?!?!" when she said, "That was 25!!!!" :)  And...it will continue to improve over time. :)  I'm posting pictures below.  The first one is from activation.  The X's indicate my hearing with no hearing aid or Esteem.  It was bad.  The E's indicate activation.  I got INCREDIBLE gains at activation!  The other picture is from yesterday.  Some frequencies were better, some were worse but overall, it showed improvement.  My speech reception threshold was 5 dB better AND my word recognition went from 56% to 68%.  I'm still learning how to process sound and recognize how words sound now. :)  The test was given on setting C3, not even the loudest.  Megan will do a quick audiogram at every adjustment to see how I'm progressing, but so far, it's amazing.


Of course, those are just numbers.  They're really, really amazing numbers, but they don't tell you how incredible this is.  After my adjustment, I met a friend of mine to head to the beach.  Hearing the water is great...but being able to hear WITHOUT worrying about sand or sunscreen breaking my hearing aids is even better.  I can really relax and even play in the water without stress.:)  We went to dinner in a really noisy restaurant with a live musician...and I could actually carry on a conversation with all of that noise.  It was amazing.  I'm still using closed captions for TV, but when I went to the movies today, the quality was awesome!!!  It was REALLY loud, but I didn't know there was such a depth to the sound!!!

Before surgery, other Esteem recipients told me the implant made them a lot more outgoing and confident.  I'm starting to understand that.  There are SO many things I want to do now - water parks, theme parks, jet skis, concerts, football games, etc etc etc.  It's just so much easier to be in crowds and talk to people.  I don't feel stupid constantly because I can't understand what's going on around me and I have to guess.  That was REALLY frustrating before.  Asking everyone to repeat themselves gets old so I would just guess what people were saying...and I was wrong a lot. :)  I'm still in awe of all of this.  It really is a miracle!