Today’s my one-year activation anniversary (activersary?). While I can’t say I’m to the point yet where things sound normal, I am definitely glad I did this. Compared to before my hearing loss, things don’t sound as good…but compared to what my hearing would be like without the CI, it’s amazing.

To recap: Going into my surgery, I had one bad ear (now the implanted one), which had about 10% word recognition, and one good ear (mild loss, about 80% word recognition). Just a couple weeks after the surgery, before I was even activated, my good ear had another sudden loss and is now at about 40% word recognition. Before that, the CI had been a “nice to have”, but after that it became a necessity. A year later, I have the CI in my left ear and a linked hearing aid in the right; I hear better with both together than I do with either one on its own, although the CI is definitely better in terms of clarity.

I’ve felt like I’ve been on a plateau for the last 6 months or so — I can recognize and distinguish different voices with no problems, but they still sound sort of like they have two layers to them: one normal, the other a little bit scratchy/echoey, like it’s coming through a radio that’s not quite tuned correctly. Music still sounds discordant and wrong, and I can’t hear harmonies very well (which makes me sad because I love harmonies), although I can easily recognize songs I know, distinguish between different instruments, and understand lyrics as long as they’re reasonably clear. I keep hoping that this will get better with time.

I don’t have a current word-recognition score, as my last test and mapping were 6 months ago (74% on individual words, 84% on phonemes, and over 90% on sentences). I figure I’ll go in next month and see where things stand.