Girl Walks Into a Bar...

Glass windows. Line of people outside, huddled under the awning out of the rain. Damp shirts and moisture-splattered jackets. What, we're going in here? Yes. Yes? Yes, do you want a drink? A drink? Um... Through the door. People smash in on all sides. Bodies everywhere. I need to step back, their faces seem pressed up against mine.

Oh, there you all are. I lost sight of you in the dim light. No, I don't think I'll put my jacket down. I'm fine. Is there music on, the way some of you keep swaying back and forth? No room to sway, but you're doing it anyway. But all I hear is the constant din. Noise, that's the only word to describe it, just noise. Some people at a booth are having burgers and fries, and I feel like I'm practically sitting in their food. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but no one apologizes in a place like this. I'm in all of your laps. The group bunches so close together we might as well all be standing in a closet. I wring my neck just to see the person standing next to me. The conversation spins faster and faster.

Laughter. Voices. All of it smashed together, a processed, ground-beef patty of noise. I can't pitch my voice just right to be heard over it. Assuming that it is possible to hear anything through this - I can't hear myself, can't hear anyone, and it astonishes me that anyone can. Oh hi, how are you. Every time I say something, you say what and I talk louder, practically shouting, and you tilt your head to hear me. I'm talking into the hole in your head, into your head and the pinna of your ear, not into your face, and it bothers me. Look at me. Watch my face. Someone asks if I want something - oh, it's food, some kind of food - and my hand raises in the sign for food and drink. Are you getting anything to eat or drink? But you don't know sign. Shoot. I shout again. How much easier this would be if I could just fingerspell and have you U-N-D-E-R-S-T-A-N-D. But I can't see anyway. Touche.

Neon signs. Television blaring. Advertisement swoops up for NCAA March Madness. Barista swoops in and out with drinks. Walls are a rose pink. I stare at the artwork. Most of it seems a touch raunchy, advertising drinks with suggestive names. Friends lean in past me to talk to each other. I've just shaken the hand of a guy whose name I keep missing. He's cute enough, but - no, never mind, not if he talks like that. Not a snowball's chance of understanding him. I'm weaving through the sheets of people. All of these vertical bodies, no room to be horizontal. My eyes hurt, and it feels like I'm squinting through smoke, but there's no smoke in here, only darkness. Yet the way everyone else talks seems so natural. What? Repeat that, please? Um, yeah. Okay. Everyone's laughing. What did you say? Never mind.

And, finally - you're heading out of here? Now? Can I go with you?

(How I feel when I go out to a bar with friends on a Friday night. What a wonderful college pastime. And my friends ask me why I'm boring and stay in on the weekends.)

When the Ground Sways Beneath Your Feet

I stumbled across this video from Advanced Bionics today and thought I'd post it. It fits into the lines of what I've written on this blog before, but there's still no getting over how incredibly sophisticated this whole CI concept is. And the best part: it sounds great!



I've been having a lot of moments lately (okay, maybe all along) of surprising complexity, destabilizing moments where it seems like my brain, under the surface, is working on a new breakthrough. Or when it seems like the meaning of something is just within reach, although I can only brush it with my fingertips. It'll happen quite suddenly: I'll be walking and talking with a friend when I notice that the sound of her voice is different than before, that it's making me gasp with its smoothness and resonance, even if I can't say exactly how or why it's changed. I'll get distracted by its rich ebb and flow, like little green tendrils are starting to blossom beneath the previously barren surface of syllabic patterns. Those are delicate roots that don't funnel down very far right now, but I can almost physically feel them growing. So, in my mind I'll gasp and then realize that I'm not paying attention to what my friend is actually saying. Why would I, when her voice by itself sounds so wonderful and strange? Earth to Rachel. Hello there, lipreading.

Speaking of which, I still do lipread extensively - but, when it's quiet, I've been having more and more moments where I'll turn half away or not quite see the shape of a word on someone's lips. Instead of panicking, I'll feel my brain gently slide in and hand the phrase to me. Oh. Thanks. That wasn't a big deal. A lot of times it's only afterwards that I realize I wasn't seeing, but hearing. My auditory therapist commented on this the other day - I'm not asking for as much repetition with her as I did during the summer, I'm more confident and self-possessed and more active in the conversation. This is something I might not have noticed on my own, but the feedback is a great confidence boost. Upon further reflection, it's true. When I'm not fried from processing all this new information, I have more room inside my own head to think.

In those quiet situations, there is a constant give-and-take between sound and sight, the two of them uncertain allies (and sound, the newcomer, often shuffling into the corner feeling unwelcome) but gradually learning to work together. But in noise it's a different story. Then, sound will rush headlong into the path of chaos while sight pulls back, disgruntled, and attempts to restore proper balance to my brain. With more small noises entering my stream of consciousness from farther away, this tug o'war is something that will continue for a while. I've found that I have a very hard time taking exams now because of the shuffling, rustling, coughing, creaking noises going on through the hush, whereas before the CI I was always perfectly content in my mental bubble of silence. I stormed out of my room the other night wondering what the heck the ruckus in my house was, only to find three people having a table conversation (okay, a lively conversation, but still, only a conversation) three rooms and two closed doors away. Really? It was hard to be upset when I realized I'd actually heard that. And heard it so loudly. Sight keeps wanting to seize sound's head and bang it on the table (okay, the rest of my body does too - it's a collective mutiny) but sound keeps holding its own, becoming bolder than ever. And, of course, more useful.

All of this, to be honest, has set me on the path of considering a second CI. There are frequent moments now where I have to check to be sure my hearing aid is still working, that side of my head feels like such a dead zone. But that's something I'll write about another time.

You Know It's Loud When...

The place where I live in college is big on parties. Almost every night the sounds of music, commotion, and people talking rushes through my wall into my room. I cannot escape (or, rather, refuse to escape), but it's a good exercise in filtering out irrelevant noise.

But last night - someone's twenty-second birthday. The house is packed and rather drunken. I've had a long week and am off to bed. I walk down the hall, past hordes of people squished together, sloshing their ubiquitous red solo cups. I am about to wash my face in the bathroom and have taken off both my hearing aid and CI. I float in silence. In that state of total deafness, I sink into my usual detachment and amused objectivity. That voice in my mind speaks up wryly; I wonder if any of these people realize how strange they appear from the outside, with the sound turned off, mouths gaping and faces contorted into improbable expressions. I want to laugh, even as I find it slightly grotesque. The uniqueness of my version of reality accompanies me as I weave through the crowd, not caring for any of it now that I cannot hear.

But I can hear, that's what disturbs me most: the music is so loud. It's thundering through my body, the beat sharply defined and harsh. And, in my right ear, in my non-CI ear that still has some residual hearing left, I can hear faint, far-away thrums. They slam into my head like popping, shocking my brain with their brute physical force. (Not so in the left ear, which remains eerily silent, so different from when magnet fastens onto skull - wow, I have become completely dependent on that apparatus.) A group beside me shouts, the song changes. And I hear it. If it's that penetrating and noisy, that even my deafness cannot shut it out, how can it be possible that the people around me are not going deaf themselves?

Except I know they must be. This is too much noise for it to be otherwise. I am reminded of a conversation I had with my auditory therapist earlier this week: just wait a few years. Soon more and more of them will be struggling to hear, to keep up, to understand, and I'll find myself better equipped to cope with hearing loss than any of them. Now, that's ironic.

And, yes, the silence as an escape is nice, but embracing it for the sake of 120 decibels of a pop song? Not worth it. I keep feeling troubled by what hearing people do to themselves. Breathe. Turn the volume down, for your own sake.

Same Place, Same Sound - Or Is It?

Coming back to familiar places, you always notice that they do not feel quite the same. The reason, in most cases, is you: you've been away, you've changed, and you're returning with a different perspective. This has been true for me in many ways since coming back from three months in Europe - but perhaps the most striking difference about home is that it sounds different. It sounds better! Having a baseline to compare to, I'm reminded of just how much my hearing is progressing.

Take airports, for instance. From my many travels back and forth to California over the summer, I've come to associate airports and airplanes with tune-ups in hearing. At first, they almost made me physically ill. That first flight back from California, almost six months ago, is something I shudder to think about. A great shapeless blob of sound hovered over my head, roaring and pulsating, so that reading - concentrating - thinking - became impossible. But now, the thrum of activity, and even of the engine, is just there, keeping me company. Now I can hear the different sounds in that large roaring cacophony, from when the engine gears up to when the wheels screech as they land to the various footsteps and announcements and voices in the airport. Loud and clashing, yes, but more subtly so.

The same is true for my house: not only are its noises more tolerable, but they are more complex. The new whirs and clicks and noises I'm noticing have me confused, and I have to go through the whole process of racing around figuring out what they are. I'm hearing more noises from farther away, and I've found that when I'm sitting in one room I sometimes know exactly what's going on in another, just by listening. How strange and amazing. It feels almost like ESP. This is not the same house that I knew three months ago.

My first day home, I sat down at our piano and struck a note: middle C. It rang forth, smooth and so beautiful that I literally gasped. Same house, same piano, and three months later it sounds so wonderfully pure and resonant, so different from the almost mechanical notes I heard over the summer. My brain is starting to interpret music as, well - music.

In the yard, the chickens roam about, clucking and crowing. I recognize their noises instantly as chicken sounds. But here, too, something is different. I'm hearing them from way, way across the yard, and they sound more richly layered, more complex, more - I don't know - chickeny. I'm noticing more different tones and subtleties in their clucking, almost as if I can interpret their moods. Too bad this doesn't stop them from being annoying. I'm still apt to shout, "Shut up!" when one rooster gets his tailfeathers into too much of a wad.

Who knew one place could feel so different, so much richer, based on the quality of sound I find there? My ear is working on finer and finer auditory skills, and the amount of texture that gives the world is astounding. It's starting to be a little more than just "noise." Now I've just got to listen to some of the specific songs I heard over the summer, return to some of the same listening exercises, go to more familiar (but yet changed) places, and see where all that puts me!

Me, the Burglar

I've never been very good at being quiet. In fact, because I've never really been able to hear myself, my tendency is to be rather loud. Just ask my family: at home when getting out of bed at night and in the mornings, I stomp around, bang the doors, and slam the lid on the toilet, to the extent that my little sister can't stop giving me grief for disturbing her sleep. My loudness is a constant joke in our house. Before the CI, my bantering strategy was to jeer that I wasn't really that noisy, that I was trying to be quiet, that hearing people were too sensitive and should just suck it up, etc. In my own mind, I honestly did think I wasn't loud.

But that, well, was because... I couldn't hear it. These days, as I've written about, background noise persists in being a real problem for me, so that if a piece of paper so much as rustles in an otherwise quiet room I sometimes want to jump up and scream. Never mind doors closing and people stomping around in the hallways outside. Shudder. I haven't learned to tune - it - out. These days, also, my morning routine is different, characterized by an almost painfully charged awareness of sound. Now, I'm a morning person, something that's a bit odd for a college student, and if I sleep past 7am I feel as if an essential part of my day has been wasted. So, because I'm usually up before my roommate, I've gotten practice in sneaking around in the mornings. But quietly this time. Or at least, trying to be.

Now, being quiet (for a deaf person) is a funnier thing than you might think. And I've noticed a general pattern that has been surprising. Obviously, when I wake up I'm enveloped only in silence. I shower and dress hearing nothing but the rhythm of my own thoughts. At these times, it's easy to become lost in my own mind, and admittedly in old habits, so that sound (and my own noisiness) seems less important. Pooh, I'm not being that loud, am I? But the moment the CI goes on - wow. Roar. My perspective undergoes a 180-degree shift. I've been absorbed in my illusions of a still, quiet morning, but it turns out that even this dark room is pulsing with so much sound. Every movement I make seems amplified, and when I freeze I find that I am still making noise, just by breathing. My attempts at being quiet seem nearly futile, because everything makes noise. Nowhere, I find, can I approach the total silence that, without the CI, I know so well. There's no escaping it: sound exists, and goes on existing whether I am aware of it or not. This may seem simple, but it's a profound realization that keeps hitting me over the head, day after day. The only thing I can say: I really would make a very poor burglar.

Funny how we don't think about things when they're not directly influencing us. For me, without the CI it's perfectly easy to go about as if sound ceases to exist for everybody else, and not just me. Only when I receive that audible check, that reminder of the world outside my own mind, can I stop and think, oh yeah. Right. That hearing perspective still feels so quirky and unnatural.

Now if only volume control were available for everybody else - for me it's a lifesaver!

Dance, Dance, Dance

It's Halloween. And what hearing people do for Halloween is dress up and go out dancing. Now, the dressing up part (and the carving pumpkins, and the eating candy) is definitely not foreign to me, but... music? dancing? These are things I've resolutely avoided since those awkward high school days, when I remember standing on the edge of the dance floor, sort of feeling the music thrumming through the floor, but not feeling at all inspired to move to it. Whenever I tried, I just felt stupid, like I was play-acting or pretending to be something I was not. The beat could be vaguely pleasant, but there was nothing exciting, nothing interesting at all in music for me.

Fast-forward a couple of years, to last night. My first time out at a dance party since the CI. I find myself in a dim room full of spinning disco lights and swaying bodies. Yes, I am in costume, as is everyone else. The speakers loom yards away, and my group of friends has started dancing right in front of them. The beat roars, pulses, rushes through my head until I almost cannot think of anything else. It tingles at my feet and up through my spine, more real and alive than it has ever been. But though I step back and forth from foot to foot, I realize that I do not know how to dance at all. I haven't done it before, and though I like the music my body does not know how it should respond. The bass is so heavy it roots me to the floor. I want to stand here and close my eyes and breathe. There's no tingling melody, and I cannot understand the words even though everyone around me is singing along.

Still, I dance. Not well, and often feeling like the song will wrench away and leave me stranded, but dancing nevertheless. Slowly my body loosens up, and although the noise teeters on the overwhelming (if only someone would explain what all this music is doing, what it's saying, where it's going), I find that I'm enjoying myself. I enjoy seeing how the other dancers interact, how they respond to the pulsing beat all around us, enjoy wondering how and why my body wants to move the way it does. I am stepping, moving, and though it feels strange, it is also exciting and new.

For a time, that is. After half an hour, my pleasure is ebbing. Everything at the dance club has suddenly become too much: the heat, the bodies, the light, and above all this music rattling through my head. My long-deafened brain can't take it anymore. Overstimulation is looming, and gasping I yell to my friends (thinking all the while, if only they signed, I wouldn't have to yell) that I'm done, I'm going out.

Weaving through the crowd, then outside into the cool night air, I reach up and rip off the magnet. The tension in my head releases as the CI dangles loosely in my hand. Ah, yes. Let there be silence.

On Noises That Stimulate Wonder

Crunchy, crunchy leaves...

Contrary to my last post, not all sounds make me nuts - more often than not, it can be exhilarating to have my concentration disrupted, to have the world tug at my attention and insist that I perceive something, regardless of how small, in a wondrously different way. Of course, this has been happening all along with the CI, but here's the most recent chronicle.

This is my first fall of experiencing such vibrant, dynamic sound. Thus, when I walk outside, I find myself directly experiencing the things I've, until now, only read and heard about secondhand. Yes, I knew leaves crunched, and maybe I could hear that a teensy bit with my hearing aid - but then it was only a dull whisper, not like this. Not this crisp, crackly, amazing noise that so perfectly matches the chill edge in the air outside. I've taken to walking - no, stomping - through them whenever possible. Around me I can hear branches rustling, birds, other people talking as they pass, doors closing, occasional cars. When the breeze picks up, it is one of my favorite sounds, so soft and whistling and elusive. I feel like I could listen to it all day. There's a lot of cobblestone on the roads around here, and my most recent game is stepping from one surface to another, from smooth sidewalk to bumpy stone to cracked asphalt to gravel, and seeing how the sound changes. I shuffle my feet, tread lightly, stamp, vary my gait, and the fact that I hear something different each time is just... stunning.

Even while I'm inside, noises sneak up on me when I don't expect them. Last night, while reading for class with a pencil in hand, it suddenly struck me that each time the lead touched the page, I heard something. Even from way down in my lap. Scratch. Scratch. I was mystified at first, and then felt as if a light bulb had switched on - the scribble of a pencil! But of course! Suddenly jubilant, I scrambled to find a piece of scrap paper, then sat scribbling, scribbling, writing my name and other random words, scrawling out in cursive versus print, listening and grinning like a fool. It was only a pencil, but hearing it was like extending my reach even farther into a world I'd never really imagined. Other sounds keep making me feel the same way: the peel ripping off an orange or a banana, the constant rustle of clothes, the stir of my hair in its ponytail, the squeak of my hands on the glass or the china, the umbrella popping open. Each time the thrill of discovery is the same. It is this thrill that I love most about the CI, this sense of wonder that seems inexplicable (and maybe incompehensible) to anyone but myself.

How amazing, that the world has sounds like these! And how lucky I am, to be able to experience them!

On Noises That Ruin My Concentration

Oh, there's a noise over there? Really? Okay, let's look. Oh, another noise? Wait, that one was only the door closing, not that important. Thank you for being so attentive, but let's concentrate now... I said let's concentrate! Yes, I know something else just happened in the corner, but it's not important either - are you listening to me? I said, are you listening? Come back over here! No, I don't know what that noise was, but I don't care - stop! We have more important things to do! All right. Thank you. Sit down. We are reading this book right now, and - yes, I know someone just coughed. At least, I think it was a cough - no, we are not looking! We are focusing! Hey, come back and sit down!

This is the way my CI makes me feel in the library. After four months, the noises that most fascinate my brain are the small ones, the rustlings in the corners and the muttered conversations far away - just the noises that, unfortunately, most distract my studies.

I used to think libraries were quiet places. Wrong. In principle everyone is working to keep the silence, but that doesn't stop the constant influx of sudden noises: floorboards creaking, doors clicking shut, pages rustling, people coughing. Aaargh! How am I supposed to think like this? My brain becomes hyperalert, my thought processes shatter. Never, never has studying been like this. In desperation to shut out all the clutter, I'm driven to music - which in itself can be distracting. (The other day I sat staring out the window and listening to Ravel's "Bolero" for ten minutes before I realized I wasn't reading.)

Forget the library! I'll try other places instead. But, even in my room, the sounds of the house creep in. The heaters and pipes and fans, plus who knows what else. Last week I went nuts for several minutes before realizing that the voices I was hearing (which I'd been worried I was imagining) were in fact wafting up through a crack in my window from the patio outside. There, when I looked, two people were talking in normal voices twenty feet below. Wow, and I heard that?

Even in a public place like a bus or a train, my mind is not completely my own. It keeps cavorting off to investigate murmured conversation many feet away, or the sounds of people heaving sighs and shifting in their seats. I'm reminded, moment by moment, that I am not alone or in isolation, but surrounded by others who are as functioning and alive as me. That's reassuring, in a way. But... but I like cutting the world off sometimes and sitting inside my own mind!

Too bad. Everything that moves makes a sound. That's been the rule from day one. Now - focus, focus, focus!

Hello, Donald

I feared this might happen. Everyone around me has turned into a duck.

Let me explain. My brain, getting better and better at processing the input from the CI, has suddenly discovered something that wasn’t there before: high-pitched sounds! The hearing loss I was born with eliminated the higher sound frequencies from my world, meaning I was always inherently biased toward low-frequency sounds. These deeper noises in the environment were always clearest to me, because they stimulated the section of the cochlea where I had the most residual sensory cells. Hence the reason I always preferred men’s voices before the CI. Higher frequencies, on the other hand, fell on the section of the cochlea’s basilar membrane where I was almost completely deaf. The only way I could perceive any kind of high-pitched noise was through artificial means: the programming on my hearing aids altered the sound to fit within the lower-frequency window in which I could hear. Now, with the CI, I’m able to hear the pure tones from the high-frequency section of the cochlea, and those high-pitched sounds are roaring – or, more accurately, squeaking – through my head for the first time.

Which means that, right now, everyone sounds like Mickey Mouse. Or Donald Duck. (I can’t endorse this description, having never heard Donald Duck before and even since the CI, but it seems hysterically accurate.) My family, friends, coworkers, strangers on the street: all their voices are cartoonish, tinny, squeaky like they’re inhaling from helium tanks. I’ve discovered that my brain, obsessive single-minded creature that it is, dwells on novelties. The lower frequencies aren’t that new, so it fixates on the higher pitches in the sound spectrum – Wait, what’s that?

A person’s voice, I tell it. Can’t you be normal?

It ignores me and says, Quack!

My days with Donald started about a week and a half ago, but have become more prevalent since. I speak and hear myself squeak – quack, quack! My house is crawling with ducks. The anchorwomen on the local news are ducks – something I noticed coming out of my room this morning, long before I saw the television. Even big, burly men speak to me with tinny quacking voices, and I struggle to keep a straight face. Admittedly, the effect fades once I turn up the CI volume and my brain becomes too stunned by sound to care whether it’s high- or low-pitched (which seems to be a line I’m treading these days).

The good news about Donald is that he shows the surprising leaps I’m taking in sound discrimination. Single-word listening exercises, as long as the sounds aren’t too closely related, have accelerated to where they’re sometimes wonderfully easy. As in, little-concentration-required, laugh-out-loud easy. This is a relief, because during the first weeks with the CI I often found myself exhausted, frustrated, and anxiously wondering if this chaos would ever make sense. I’ve never had so many consecutive stressed-out days in my life.

But at the same time, I’ve never felt so stimulated, so curious about the workings of the world.

The best news thus far: after borrowing them from a friend, I’ve started listening to the Harry Potter books on CD. This is something that I never could have done with hearing aids, and something that marks a huge step up in my abilities with the CI. Finally, I'm hearing well enough to follow speech for a sustained period of time, and these audiobooks are a great opportunity to practice. Harry and I have a long history – like many others from my generation, I was a huge fan when I was younger – and even now he still has something to teach me. I’ve heard countless accolades for Jim Dale’s Grammy Award-winning reading, and now it was time to hear it for myself. And let this deaf girl tell you, it’s quite good. I find the different voices fascinating, though at the beginning they tended to throw me off. My personal favorites are Dumbledore and Ron; Hermione is still somewhat difficult, while I find Malfoy and the Dursleys a hoot. (Of course, they all tend to sound like ducks!) The first day or two of listening required the greatest adjustment, seeing as all I’d been doing was children’s books. My brain would get tired after two pages and lose its place. Now, though, I can listen to one or two chapters at a time, without expending the same intense attention and energy. Sometimes I read ahead of the narrator’s voice, close my eyes, and just listen to the rhythm and flow of the words.

And imagine that, three weeks ago, I started with electric jolts!

Grow, Brain, Grow

I have reverted to my childhood. Well, sort of. With each day that goes by, it becomes clearer to me that my CI ear is a baby ear, and that I must treat it accordingly. This means several things:

1. Not expecting it to sound like the natural hearing in my right ear, either in smoothness or coherence
2. Teaching it everything - and I mean everything - about the world, step by step
3. Being willing to accept and explore the surprises it discovers along the way

It's day seven, and I have made tremendous progress since the electric-shock feeling of first being turned on. I'm hearing much more, the sounds are more dynamic and complex than their initial one-dimensional jolts, and I'm having an easier time making connections between what's happening around me and what I'm hearing. However, I still have a long way to go. Environmental sounds still sound staticky and mechanical, and the sound quality with my CI is sorely lacking - though the sound quantity isn't! Being a perfectionist, and being used to my world sounding and feeling just so, this irritating robotic-noise soup is hard for me to handle.

That said, I did not expect the first weeks with my CI to be easy. Now is where the real work starts. Beginning with children's books! I checked out four books on tape from the public library last week, sat down with my sister's boom box, and proceeded to listen to them until the entire house was probably begging for me to stop. I can now practically recite Goodnight Moon by heart - not that that's an accomplishment! (It's amazing how much longer and more exciting these books seemed when I was young.) I've scoped out the territory, though: children's books on tape tend to be fraught with music, background noises, and corresponding sound effects. That's all very well for getting hearing kids excited about reading, but for me it's obnoxious and not at all helpful! Having a real live person read to me is better - now if only those pages wouldn't crackle when I turn them.

I'm hoping to progress to beginning chapter books and novels - actual novels! - soon, but it depends on how quickly my brain grows those nerve connections. To boost the expansion of my auditory cortex, I've been working on a variety of other exercises. I recruit unsuspecting family members and have them read three or four words to me at random while I try and piece together how on earth the noises emitting from their throats are connected. It's easiest to start with words with different syllable numbers - for instance, banana and corn - but I've been able to progress to a set of, say, four one-syllable words. Harder even is words that have very similar sounds, or words that only differ by a single phoneme. Advanced Bionics has a downloadable computer module, as well, that has similar exercises in flashcard form. I sit in my room for hours at a time, listening to the computer say "shoe" over and over again. (Most discouraging was the realization that, while I'm currently only getting 3 out of 5 correct answers with my CI, my score with my right hearing aid alone is a perfect 5/5! Although I guess I do have 20 more years of practice with that ear...)

The sounds are not at all like what I hear with hearing aids. They're louder and more distinctive, and I hear more of them, but as of now they make no sense. Only my knowledge of phonetics, gained from 18 years of speech therapy and even an introductory linguistics class in college, has allowed me to make any kind of progress. I guess by process of deduction: the noise at the end of that word was especially sharp and explosive, so it must be a stop. Or, that was a high-frequency buzz, so it's some kind of fricative or sibilant. It's a taxing intellectual process. I have no idea how other congenitally deaf people could handle it without a prior history of speech therapy. Astonishingly, though, I've discovered that I'm now hearing all of the sounds in a word, sharp and individual, whereas before I only heard some of them - and often left off sounds at the end of a word as a result. The CI is giving me all of the pieces, as fragmented as they currently are. The problem is putting those pieces together into a whole.

Other exercises I've done: distinguishing between higher and lower notes on the piano, which I find surprisingly easy. Listening for the doorbell versus a knock at the front door - something which drives both my dogs insane! Distinguishing between male and female voices. Contrary to before my CI, I now find that female voices sound clearer and more intelligible (I've always preferred those deep bass male voices, having very little residual high-frequency hearing). Listening to even more music. The vocals and other instruments are coming through now, wheezy and staticky, not just the beat. Listening to two minimal-pair words and distinguishing whether they're the same or different. Taking walks or just sitting somewhere and having someone point out the various noises in the environment. (New discoveries: the clock ticking, my dog panting, water running from the faucet, myself chewing or swallowing, someone dropping something or making a noise from across the room.) My baby ear is growing!

Bang, Boom, Click

The battle of wills has started. Either I'll adjust to my CI and take off to amazing feats unknown, or it'll drive me insane. Jumping from hearing almost nothing, to pounding sound, all of the time, is a huge adjustment, to say the least.

To describe how I felt all day yesterday, and part of today: Harassed. On edge. Miserable. Overwhelmed. This cool video sums it up (might want to turn down the computer volume first):



When I turn on my CI, my entire body tenses. I'm being bombarded with noise, as jagged and unrelenting as sharp rocks or mountain peaks. What I hear no longer sounds like electric jolts or tones, more like harsh, static clicks. My skull is a metal can, and someone's shaking dice in it, playing Yahtzee. Rattle, rattle, rattle, BANG! This change is good, because it means the sound quality is slowly improving (only three days in!). But it's also bad, because I can't stand it. All day long, I'm being ground to a pulp, and the feeling of it is hideous.

I went back into the office yesterday, thinking that it'd at least be a quiet environment. Boy, was I wrong. I turned on my computer and started typing, and it was as if someone had set off an avalanche. A thousand stones tumbled off a cliff, banging and clattering down into my mind. After thirty seconds, I stopped and panted. Even the mouse made unbearably loud noises - click, click, click! I turned the scroll wheel to navigate a webpage - clickclickclickickickck! This went on all day. Whir. Click. Bang. Shhhh. Click. Roar! Utterly peeved and agitated, I would sit back in my chair to try to give myself a reprieve - and then immediately jump and tense when I heard myself exhale. Who knew my breathing was so loud? When my coworkers came in to talk to me, their voices shook my skull - boom boom boom. By the end of the day I was impossibly stressed, tensing and holding my breath so I wouldn't make a sound, inhaling before launching into another round of typing. When the phone rang, I almost leaped to unplug it and throw it out the window. I felt like vomiting, screaming, passing out, bursting into tears, or all four. Shut up!

Today has been a little better. Between yesterday afternoon and this morning, I've discovered some new sounds: birds squabbling in the trees by my front porch, cicadas buzzing in harmony, the dog next door barking incessantly. My horse is big and loud: crunching carrots by my head like a tyrannosaurus, clopping across concrete so hard I'm surprised it doesn't crack, snorting, whinnying whenever she sees me come out the door. I'm suddenly understanding her fear of flapping plastic bags. They do sound like monsters! In my house, the air conditioning is a constant buzz, and the refrigerator never stops rumbling. When I read I startle myself every time I turn a page and hear the rustle of paper. Clothes audibly slip on and off. How is it possible for that teeny little button to make a sound? Dresser drawers, doors creaking, keys rattling. It's inescapable.

But by far the highlight of my CI experience so far - music! I figured out this morning how to plug my sister's iPod into an adapter hook on my CI processor, and proceeded to rock out for the next hour and a half. I can only hear the bass and beat right now, but I could listen to it all day. Unlike the chaotic noises all around me, music is rhythmic, pleasing, and purposeful. How was I to know it was so nice? Right now, it's the only thing that I can listen to and actually enjoy. Everything else is a jumbled, nausea-inducing mess. I see more iPod days in my future, but in the meantime, I hope the other sounds clear up fast!