Had my 3-month mapping today. She also tested my word recognition — this was a man’s voice saying a series of words preceded by “Ready” (e.,g., “Ready – ball”) and I had to repeat the word after “ready”. I got 64% on the words; she also counted how often I got the right sound, even if I didn’t get precisely the right word, and that was 82%. I feel like I do better than 64% in normal conversation, at least in a quiet setting, because I have context; where I have trouble is if someone uses an unfamiliar word or makes a quick subject change when I’m not expecting it. And I’m doing better with men’s voices than women’s.

I also got a Naida Link hearing aid for the other ear about a week ago. The one I was using, one of a pair of Starkey Muse BiCROS (obviously, the other half of the pair was replaced by my CI), was pretty useless and I stopped wearing it. The Link is pretty cool in that it (as its name implies) links to my CI and has similar programs. I have a little trouble understanding people with just the hearing aid, but it does improve my ability to hear in stereo.

At today’s appointment, I asked for a streaming-only program — currently, if I use my normal everyday program for Bluetooth streaming, I have problems if there’s a lot of background noise, such as at the gym, because it’s still picking up sound from the processor’s microphones; it’s set to 70% from streaming and 30% from the microphones, so that I can hear if there’s something going on that I need to hear, like a fire alarm or something. But there are times when I just want to hear the streaming — I still have a little bit of hearing in my other ear that would certainly be enough to hear a fire alarm, and plus my husband’s usually with me when I’m likely to use this program, so he’d alert me to anything I needed to know about. The new program can also stream to the hearing aid, so I get the sound in both ears. For situations where I still want to be able to hear external sounds, I can use program 1 for streaming like I have been doing all along.

The new program also helped an issue I was having with the TV Connector: unless I had the TV’s normal sound muted (impractical unless I’m watching alone), I got this weird echo effect when streaming from the TV to my CI Connect. The processor microphones would be picking up the sound from the TV’s speakers a fraction of a second before I’d get it through the streaming, so I’d hear everything twice, just slightly unsynchronized. Disabling the processor microphones fixed that, so I can now use the TV Connector. (I’d been streaming through the Roger Select instead, which didn’t seem to have that problem for some reason.)

These are my programs now (not that I have any idea how to interpret this):

In other news, AB sent me a replacement CI Connect after I complained to them about all the problems I had with my original one. This one works much, much better — hasn’t cut out at all, even in the places where the old one did, and I can keep my phone in my pocket and it’ll still work. So it was just defective, I guess.

My biggest problem lately has been volume. I got the audiologist to lower it a bit, because small but sudden sounds, like someone coughing, have a tendency to make me jump out of my skin, and things like my coworkers talking one or two offices away have been driving me batty. I can (and do) turn it down, of course, but it only goes down so far. Hopefully this mapping will help there; at least, I didn’t feel the need to close my office door today like I’d been doing the last few days.

So, it’s going reasonably well. Understanding people still takes mental effort, but I’m grateful that I can understand them at all.