Haven’t updated in a while because there hasn’t been much to say, but this week I had my first mapping in a year — I’d been putting it off due to the pandemic.

My word and sentence recognition scores are the same as last year. I got in the low 70s on individual words, in the 80s on phonemes, and 96% on sentences in quiet — I really do best with context. Background noise was more of a problem, but it’s not like I’ve had many opportunities to get out and be social this last year.

I will admit that I was a little disappointed that my individual word score didn’t improve, but my audiologist was happy with it, especially since I did so well on sentences, and I suppose she’s right — it’s not like people are saying random words to me out of the blue. I guess I’d just hoped that it would be clearer after a year and a half.

If I had to describe how voices sound to me, I’d say that everyone sounds like they’re on the phone — so they’re recognizable and understandable, but the quality is not quite as good as before I started losing my hearing. Don’t get me wrong; I am still very, very grateful that I can hear at all, because as I’ve said before, comparing the CI to my normal hearing is pointless. If I compare it to what I would have without the implant, there’s no contest — I’d rather be able to hear imperfectly than hardly at all.

Music still sounds kind of like a badly-tuned radio, and certain notes are discordant and not what they should be. During this week’s mapping, I asked for some tweaks to my streaming-only program in the hopes of making music sound better, but it didn’t really help much, and as a side-effect, TV streaming now kind of sucks — non-speech sounds are much louder and can sometimes make me jump. I plan to give it a couple weeks and see if I get used to it; if not, I’ll go in and get her to put the old program back.

Meanwhile, I’ve been seeing a ton of marketing buzz around AB’s upcoming new Marvel processor, and I will admit that some of the features seem pretty cool. For example, it will have built-in Bluetooth streaming with no need for an accessory. Same goes for connectivity with the Roger Select microphone — my current processor requires a receiver to use the Roger, but the new one has it built in. And it will have a phone app that will show the battery life (my Q90 will start beeping when the battery is low, but there’s no way to tell how low) and allow you to adjust the mic/aux balance on the fly, which would mean I wouldn’t even need a special streaming-only program.

So, there’s definitely some pretty exciting stuff there. Of course, since I just got mine a year and a half ago, there’s no way that my insurance will pay for a new processor, so my current plan is to wait a few months for patients to start getting the Marvel, and see what people who don’t work for AB have to say about it, especially those who are upgrading from older models since they can say how it compares. If I like what I hear, I’ll go get evaluated to see if my right ear qualifies for a CI; if so, then I’ll consider going bilateral, in which case I’ll get two processors and I can use the Q90s as backups. If it’s not approved for the right ear, I might decide to pay out-of-pocket for the new processor. But before any of that, I want to give them time to work out any bugs (because new technology almost always has bugs) and see if it’s worth the money.

I’m still not 100% sure I’m psychologically ready to go bilateral, even if I’m approved. With no hearing aid or CI processor, I’m about a half-step above functionally deaf: I can hear loud sounds with my non-implanted ear (the implanted one has no natural hearing at all — it’s dead without the CI), and I can hear when people are talking in the same room as me, but I can’t understand much of what they’re saying unless they’re really close to my ear and speaking very slowly and clearly — and even then it’s hit or miss. So yeah, almost deaf. But when I go to sleep at night and I’m not wearing my processor and hearing aid, if there were a really loud sound like the smoke alarm going off, I would most likely hear it and wake up. The thought of not having that little bit of hearing, as pitiful as it is, is kind of scary — as is being 100% reliant on technology in order to hear. Of course now I’m more like 95% reliant, so I’m not sure it’s that big a difference, especially since my husband can hear and I trust him to wake me up in an emergency.

Well, since I don’t plan to do anything until I’ve decided whether the Marvel is worth getting, I have some time to think about it.