As of yesterday, it’s two months after my surgery and one month after activation.

I have basically stopped wearing the hearing aid in the other ear at this point because I understand more with the CI than with what used to be my good ear. It’s still far from perfect; I can’t easily distinguish between individual voices and everything still sounds weird, but I’m understanding more every day. It’s harder when there’s background noise or more than one person talking at a time, but I get the impression that that’s just a problem with CIs in general.

My audiologist tells me that I will have one more mapping where it’s just increasing in volume, and then we’ll get to the real programs, where she starts tweaking things so they sound better. So I figure that if I’m doing this well before I get to that, it can only get better.

I went to an event that AB (my implant maker) hosted on Sunday at the National Botanical Gardens. It was sometimes hard to understand people there because of too many conversations going on nearby, but I got to meet my local AB representative and talk to a bunch of people who’ve had their implants for years (and all love them). I was the newest one by far.

I finally got access to AB’s web store and ordered a couple of extra cables because I can’t find the second one that came with my implant. The cables are under warranty, but I didn’t want to be without one if anything should happen to my primary. But wow, they are super-expensive — $125 for a 4-inch cable! I know they have a small market and they’re a business and they have to make money and all, but geez. Even half that amount would have seemed expensive.

As to my other ear, I finally finished my course of hyperbaric oxygen treatments (and I am so glad that’s over, as having to come in early, leave late, and take several hours out of the middle of every workday was killing me), but unfortunately there has been no improvement. Since I’m unwilling to pursue the “woo” remedies like chiropractic or acupuncture, I’ve now come to the end of my treatment options; that’s the thing about idiopathic sudden hearing loss: sometimes treatment works, sometimes it doesn’t. Makes me really glad I got the implant, because so far it’s taking up the slack as I’d hoped. I didn’t expect that I’d be able to rely on it this soon after activation, but I’m glad it’s working so well.