It’s been four years today since my first (left) implant was activated, and a little over two years since the second, so I thought I’d check in. I haven’t been posting lately because there hasn’t really been much new to say. Unlike in the beginning, there aren’t new milestones happening all the time; I’m just living my life.

I’m now at the point where I only need to see the audiologist once a year or so as long as I’m not having any problems. I just had my annual visit last week, and my results after testing in the booth were a bit of a surprise. The last few times I was tested, my individual word recognition scores in quiet were in the 70s, with sentences in the 90s, so I figured I had hit a plateau and that was as good as I’d get. However, this time I got 82% on individual words in the left ear, 94% in the right ear, and 99% for both ears together, which is a definite improvement. For sentences (with both ears), I got 99% in quiet, and 85% and 65% on the two noise tests (the latter being the higher noise level).

As the above scores show, my right ear is slightly better than my left, although I hear best with both together. The left is the one that I had to have the revision on last year; thankfully there have been no issues with the new implant on that side thus far, and AB’s reliability reports for that model have also been promising, with far fewer failures than the recalled model had at this point in its lifetime.

In terms of daily life, I live fairly normally; my hearing issues don’t really cause me too much difficulty. I do sometimes miss things here and there, and situations where there’s background noise are more challenging. That’s just a limitation I’m learning to live with, and I’m getting better at letting it go when I miss something rather than stressing about it.

I still tend to use captions when watching TV, movies, etc. I don’t have to rely on them 100%, but it’s nice to have them when the background sound gets loud or someone has an accent.

Music still doesn’t sound great. I can listen to songs I knew well before my hearing loss, since I remember how they’re supposed to sound, but my days of discovering new bands may be finished. This doesn’t bother me a whole lot, since it’s not like I was ever all that adventurous when it came to new music anyway.

The sound quality of the CIs is still just…okay, as compared to normal hearing. It still sounds like the person I’m talking to is at the other end of a phone call, which makes sense given that everything I hear is being picked up by microphones and there are 16 electrodes stimulating each of my cochleas rather than millions of tiny hair cells. However, it remains way better than being deaf, and I am grateful to be able to hear at all. And I do rather enjoy being able to completely shut off my hearing when the world gets too loud. I sleep way better at night now that every little noise doesn’t wake me up.

So, that’s the state of things after 4 years of having a CI and two years with bilateral CIs.