Lately I've been growing frustrated (again) by the fact that my listening progress doesn't feel like it's moving as fast as I'd like it to. This perspective challenge has been present all along with the CI (where am I going? how have I improved?), but it arises and recurs in waves. There are days in which I feel unbelievably optimistic, and others in which what I want hovers out of reach. About to graduate from college, I look out at the "real world" and all the things in it and often feel intimidated, since communication can still seem like a barrier. Of course, success is possible anyway, and I've gotten better at getting creative in the last few years, but the fact remains that some things are still not straightforward.
Yet, this morning, I had a session with my auditory therapist in which I voiced some of the above insecurities. In controlled situations, the listening progress is there, but it often feels slow. We talked a bit, and then she flipped back through her file and pulled out a piece of paper. On it were written my goals for the CI from a year ago, or maybe a year and a half. They were as follows:
1. Recognize more individual words based on sound alone
A million times yes. It really depends on the good old auditory memory, but the fact that I can now hear a word and know what it is, based on listening, is amazing.
2. Be able to have base-level conversations in quiet with a familiar voice
Yes. Although this often doesn't apply to the real world, I've known for a while that if I sit inside with either of my parents or someone else familiar, I will be able to hear, understand, and respond to the things they say to me.
3. Hear and recognize more high-frequency sounds than I used to
Definitely yes. It's astonishing, how much I've started taking them for granted.
4. Encounter fewer situations in which people ask me, "Did you hear that noise?" and I reply, "No."
Yes! I can't remember the last time this happened. More often, it's the reverse: people ask me if I heard that noise and I internally tilt my head and laugh and then say, "Yeah, I did." Like, duh, my CI is awesome. Or I actually do tilt my head and listen and say, "Oh! Yes! That's a cool new noise!"
5. Feel more comfortable and confident in a group
This is probably the only one for which my answer is "not so much." There are just too many variables, although various strategies have helped me cope better in groups than I used to - including knowing my limits and being able to engage and disengage as necessary.
Number five notwithstanding, these are all things that I found unimaginable two years ago. Looking back on that progress is empowering, even if, as my therapist pointed out, of course the goal that I'm always subconsciously thinking of, that I'm seeing around me, that I'm wanting each day, is to sit at a table with a group of smart, engaging, talkative hearing friends and understand their rapid-fire conversations and join in like a pro. But sometimes it's better to measure progress from the ground up. These are some hefty peaks scaled.
Reality check: achieved. For now.
Showing posts with label therapy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label therapy. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
One Year of Bionic
On this same Wednesday one year ago, I went through my last pre-op appointments, then sat and waited for the CI surgery that would take place the following morning. Killed time and waited. Went to dinner and waited. Made some nervous conversation. Went to bed and lay awake and waited. Couldn't sleep because of my mixed excitement and anxiety and dread. What was I getting myself into?
Today, after meeting with my auditory therapist, I walked out grinning. My one-year CI remapping will be in a few weeks, and although I've reached the point where I'm continually cranking the volume up on my processor, itching once again for more sound and more range, what I have to work with is pretty remarkable.
First exercise: open set of random sentences that I wasn't allowed to look at or study beforehand. I got half of them completely correct on the first try, and got large chunks of the rest (with some missed words or slight flubs on phonemes). My score: 75%, give or take, maybe even 80%.
Second exercise: minimal-pair drills with monosyllabic words, probably one of the hardest tasks for me since I'm literally listening for a difference of a single phoneme, while listening without any context. My score: 90%. Ninety freaking percent.
And the best part: while I felt confident enough throughout, I had one of those head-spinning moments afterwards when I saw the numbers. Why, hadn't I been guessing most of the time? Doesn't seem like it. My conscious mind keeps chugging along, but beneath the surface my brain is putting two and two together, all by itself.
I couldn't have asked for a better feeling compared to that nauseous sensation I had one year ago, while sitting in those hospital waiting rooms. It's been a steep learning curve, but with the CI my brain is clicking. It's starting to sprint along instead of stumbling. It's hearing!
Today, after meeting with my auditory therapist, I walked out grinning. My one-year CI remapping will be in a few weeks, and although I've reached the point where I'm continually cranking the volume up on my processor, itching once again for more sound and more range, what I have to work with is pretty remarkable.
First exercise: open set of random sentences that I wasn't allowed to look at or study beforehand. I got half of them completely correct on the first try, and got large chunks of the rest (with some missed words or slight flubs on phonemes). My score: 75%, give or take, maybe even 80%.
Second exercise: minimal-pair drills with monosyllabic words, probably one of the hardest tasks for me since I'm literally listening for a difference of a single phoneme, while listening without any context. My score: 90%. Ninety freaking percent.
And the best part: while I felt confident enough throughout, I had one of those head-spinning moments afterwards when I saw the numbers. Why, hadn't I been guessing most of the time? Doesn't seem like it. My conscious mind keeps chugging along, but beneath the surface my brain is putting two and two together, all by itself.
I couldn't have asked for a better feeling compared to that nauseous sensation I had one year ago, while sitting in those hospital waiting rooms. It's been a steep learning curve, but with the CI my brain is clicking. It's starting to sprint along instead of stumbling. It's hearing!
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
The Black Box, Revisited
This brain business is freaking me out. I’m wondering how much more complex my mind is than I consciously realize. Today I had another auditory therapy appointment, my first since last quarter, and while I walked away feeling excited, I also walked away feeling unsettled. What exactly is going on inside that black box that I don’t understand?
To offer a quick recap: my therapist and I sat down and discussed my progress over the last month or so, then proceeded to listening exercises that I’ve done a few times before. Throughout, she commented on my growing confidence and poise with listening, or at least my growing willingness to persevere with deciphering what I hear. To paraphrase her words, she told me: “Your entire life, you’ve had to hang back, to resign yourself and say, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t understand this.’ You’ve felt constantly unsure and you’ve grown used to being cautious as a result. Now you have this wonderful new tool that helps you engage better, and you’re learning how to overcome that hesitation that you’ve grown used to.”
How true, not only for me but for anyone else with a hearing loss. And how nice to have this perspective articulated so clearly. Disengagement has been a survival mechanism for me for so long that it’s hard for me to commit my brain to listening, to trying to piece the sounds together despite having less than ten months’ experience with this auditory mess. The words streak by, not making any sense at first, that old response kicks in and I think “I can’t do this! For heaven's sake, I’m deaf!” and then I get overwhelmed and implode and my mind switches off. I don’t do this intentionally, I don’t think. It’s not that I mean to give up. It’s that habit (by now, almost instinct) tells me that my efforts will be futile and that trying isn’t even an option. Spoken word gibberish soup, again. So much for that.
But when I do try, strange things happen. One of today’s exercises dealt with listening to a simple sentence involving two words: “Please pick up (food item) and (food item) from the store.” Old hat, this exercise, even while the words to engrain in my auditory memory seem limitless! Some of the food words, I’d heard often enough to get right away, such as hamburgers and French fries. Others were more unexpected, and when my auditory therapist saw that I wasn’t getting them she would switch to verbally describing them to give me clues, instead of either 1) repeating the word over and over again while I got progressively more frustrated, or 2) throwing in the towel and telling me the word outright. This backroads strategy is one that she’s used from the beginning, to force me to listen in the context of language. It’s also very hard for me right now. Remember, I’m listening to full-bodied descriptive sentences without lipreading. Talk about a jump up!
So, today I sat and listened to her describing this unknown word using other unknown words, the sounds piling up and toppling over and burying me in their rush, and while I couldn’t have told you what I was hearing I also wasn’t completely overwhelmed. This time was different. The words going by sounded like English words, they sounded like language. They sounded comfy, like they could have been my friends. Even if it was impossible for me to say exactly what they were, at least after the fact – I felt more like I was brushing each one of them as they passed, but not strongly enough to sink in my hook and reel them in. Once in a while, one or two would jump up and I would grasp a fleeting phrase, but then struggle to hold on as the stream continued. “This is a… breakfast… You use it to… and it… green…” Other times, I would rustle against individual sounds but couldn’t think fast enough to assemble them into words.
Yet, out of this ghostly, translucent chaos, some sort of picture emerged. The first time this happened, I listened to my therapist’s stream of speech, sat there subconsciously ruminating, and then said, “Yogurt.”
“Very good!” she told me.
“That’s really what it was? Yogurt?”
“Yes.”
How did I ever get that? All I’d heard, at least consciously, was something about flavors and strawberries. Impossible, for my brain to make the leap from that to “yogurt.”
But then it happened again. The word in question: zucchini. I listened, gathered that my therapist was talking about a long and green vegetable, but instead of searching through my mental food vocabulary to find something that fit the bill, the word popped up and came to me right then. I knew. It had been there all along, beneath the surface of my brain, but hesitating and not knowing how to fight its way into conscious articulation.
And again. Something about cutting and breakfast and sugar, only half-grasped and feeling like a murky dream: without a doubt, it must be grapefruit. I wasn’t assembling clues, because the clues themselves hardly made sense. Unless they were assembling subconsciously, just like everything else?
Whoa whoa whoa, wait. What the eff is going on? I don’t get this. How can I so definitively say something, based on so little (read: almost nonexistent) proof? Unless the proof is there in abundance, somewhere deep within that black box, and I’m not capable of realizing it? What determines whether the sounds click together to make a word or whether they don’t? How can all this be happening without the conscious input of my work ethic or deductive reasoning or problem-solving skills, but based only on my willingness to sit there and listen to and accept what seems like chaos? How can my brain be so resourceful, all by itself and seemingly without me?
And, at the same time, how amazing is that?!
To offer a quick recap: my therapist and I sat down and discussed my progress over the last month or so, then proceeded to listening exercises that I’ve done a few times before. Throughout, she commented on my growing confidence and poise with listening, or at least my growing willingness to persevere with deciphering what I hear. To paraphrase her words, she told me: “Your entire life, you’ve had to hang back, to resign yourself and say, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t understand this.’ You’ve felt constantly unsure and you’ve grown used to being cautious as a result. Now you have this wonderful new tool that helps you engage better, and you’re learning how to overcome that hesitation that you’ve grown used to.”
How true, not only for me but for anyone else with a hearing loss. And how nice to have this perspective articulated so clearly. Disengagement has been a survival mechanism for me for so long that it’s hard for me to commit my brain to listening, to trying to piece the sounds together despite having less than ten months’ experience with this auditory mess. The words streak by, not making any sense at first, that old response kicks in and I think “I can’t do this! For heaven's sake, I’m deaf!” and then I get overwhelmed and implode and my mind switches off. I don’t do this intentionally, I don’t think. It’s not that I mean to give up. It’s that habit (by now, almost instinct) tells me that my efforts will be futile and that trying isn’t even an option. Spoken word gibberish soup, again. So much for that.
But when I do try, strange things happen. One of today’s exercises dealt with listening to a simple sentence involving two words: “Please pick up (food item) and (food item) from the store.” Old hat, this exercise, even while the words to engrain in my auditory memory seem limitless! Some of the food words, I’d heard often enough to get right away, such as hamburgers and French fries. Others were more unexpected, and when my auditory therapist saw that I wasn’t getting them she would switch to verbally describing them to give me clues, instead of either 1) repeating the word over and over again while I got progressively more frustrated, or 2) throwing in the towel and telling me the word outright. This backroads strategy is one that she’s used from the beginning, to force me to listen in the context of language. It’s also very hard for me right now. Remember, I’m listening to full-bodied descriptive sentences without lipreading. Talk about a jump up!
So, today I sat and listened to her describing this unknown word using other unknown words, the sounds piling up and toppling over and burying me in their rush, and while I couldn’t have told you what I was hearing I also wasn’t completely overwhelmed. This time was different. The words going by sounded like English words, they sounded like language. They sounded comfy, like they could have been my friends. Even if it was impossible for me to say exactly what they were, at least after the fact – I felt more like I was brushing each one of them as they passed, but not strongly enough to sink in my hook and reel them in. Once in a while, one or two would jump up and I would grasp a fleeting phrase, but then struggle to hold on as the stream continued. “This is a… breakfast… You use it to… and it… green…” Other times, I would rustle against individual sounds but couldn’t think fast enough to assemble them into words.
Yet, out of this ghostly, translucent chaos, some sort of picture emerged. The first time this happened, I listened to my therapist’s stream of speech, sat there subconsciously ruminating, and then said, “Yogurt.”
“Very good!” she told me.
“That’s really what it was? Yogurt?”
“Yes.”
How did I ever get that? All I’d heard, at least consciously, was something about flavors and strawberries. Impossible, for my brain to make the leap from that to “yogurt.”
But then it happened again. The word in question: zucchini. I listened, gathered that my therapist was talking about a long and green vegetable, but instead of searching through my mental food vocabulary to find something that fit the bill, the word popped up and came to me right then. I knew. It had been there all along, beneath the surface of my brain, but hesitating and not knowing how to fight its way into conscious articulation.
And again. Something about cutting and breakfast and sugar, only half-grasped and feeling like a murky dream: without a doubt, it must be grapefruit. I wasn’t assembling clues, because the clues themselves hardly made sense. Unless they were assembling subconsciously, just like everything else?
Whoa whoa whoa, wait. What the eff is going on? I don’t get this. How can I so definitively say something, based on so little (read: almost nonexistent) proof? Unless the proof is there in abundance, somewhere deep within that black box, and I’m not capable of realizing it? What determines whether the sounds click together to make a word or whether they don’t? How can all this be happening without the conscious input of my work ethic or deductive reasoning or problem-solving skills, but based only on my willingness to sit there and listen to and accept what seems like chaos? How can my brain be so resourceful, all by itself and seemingly without me?
And, at the same time, how amazing is that?!
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Auditory Memory and Other Ramblings
Auditory therapy, session two. Take-away points: right now it's all about building confidence and auditory memory. (Nothing new. That mental sound dictionary is going to be years in the making.) And it's about making myself stretch, too, defining a set that's neither too open nor too closed. I have to flex my listening muscles, so to speak, and make myself work hard without becoming frustrated or feeling like the answer is out of reach. It's a tricky balance. So how do I push those boundaries? This week we tried several things. Listening and selecting sentences at different volumes and distances, defining a category and then having me discern open-ended statements about it, listening to sets of words and determining which one did not belong. That brain of mine is still reluctant to listen, to put its faith in something previously so unknown, but the more I push it the more it cooperates.
Also, I need to put aside my fear of incomprehension. It's a bit ironic that lack of communication is probably my biggest fear, yet it's something with which I have a tremendous amount of experience. Over the years I've come up with a number of coping mechanisms for situations when I'm just not getting it. My brain has gotten good at glossing things over, at filling in the blanks when it can and trying to cope when it can't. Up to this point, that puzzle-solving process has mainly applied to lipreading, but now it applies to listening too. While deciphering the speech sounds I hear, I need to make myself release some of my inner tension. I'm going into overdrive, piecing together sounds in an attempt to extract a statement that makes sense, and worrying when none of it fits - but, when things do click, it often happens suddenly. No analysis involved: I know what I'm hearing! That's the goal, moving forward - to ask myself, am I listening with my ears or with my brain? That analytical mind of mine has always been a huge asset, but maybe one day it'll be a bit less necessary, or a bit less overburdened, as more of the pieces fall into place. What a great thought.
And, finally - this may be a bit redundant, but I keep feeling stunned at the texture of the world with sound in it. Seven months has not distilled my private sense of wonder. There's a bird building a nest outside my window, and I hear it right now as I type. I've been noticing new types of bird calls around campus, too, and other sounds keep shadowing me, feeling more and more like good friends. The whistling of the wind, the squeal of my bike tires, overlapping machinery, people's voices carrying over from the most improbable places. Hard work aside, all of this is so, so amazing.
Also, I need to put aside my fear of incomprehension. It's a bit ironic that lack of communication is probably my biggest fear, yet it's something with which I have a tremendous amount of experience. Over the years I've come up with a number of coping mechanisms for situations when I'm just not getting it. My brain has gotten good at glossing things over, at filling in the blanks when it can and trying to cope when it can't. Up to this point, that puzzle-solving process has mainly applied to lipreading, but now it applies to listening too. While deciphering the speech sounds I hear, I need to make myself release some of my inner tension. I'm going into overdrive, piecing together sounds in an attempt to extract a statement that makes sense, and worrying when none of it fits - but, when things do click, it often happens suddenly. No analysis involved: I know what I'm hearing! That's the goal, moving forward - to ask myself, am I listening with my ears or with my brain? That analytical mind of mine has always been a huge asset, but maybe one day it'll be a bit less necessary, or a bit less overburdened, as more of the pieces fall into place. What a great thought.
And, finally - this may be a bit redundant, but I keep feeling stunned at the texture of the world with sound in it. Seven months has not distilled my private sense of wonder. There's a bird building a nest outside my window, and I hear it right now as I type. I've been noticing new types of bird calls around campus, too, and other sounds keep shadowing me, feeling more and more like good friends. The whistling of the wind, the squeal of my bike tires, overlapping machinery, people's voices carrying over from the most improbable places. Hard work aside, all of this is so, so amazing.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Milestones!
Today I popped on my CI and drove out for my first session with an auditory therapist since September. I'd been into her office once or twice over the summer when I flew out for remappings, but due to being gone for so long I hadn't been on any kind of directed program. Go out into the world and figure out the sounds in it! That was my task.
And, in many ways, it will continue to be my task for a while yet. CI rehab, if nothing else, is very individually motivated. I was pleased to find today that I've achieved a slew of milestones since July and September - things that were hard or impossible for me then are easy now. (Or, if not easy, then possible. That's still encouraging!) I could identify all of the major speech sounds, something which brought back memories of sitting in my house in July getting frustrated over "ah" and "oo" and wondering if this contraption would ever make sense. Ah, YES. Sentence and word identification, provided that I had a closed set, also turned out to be a relative breeze, even without a leading phrase for minimal-pair words. Open sets are still a struggle, not unexpectedly so, but I'm picking out bits and sounds throughout the sentences I'm given. (This is something I've noticed in everyday use, while sitting where I cannot lipread a person - I can catch the common words like "and," "but," "or," "I mean," "you know." Of course, this doesn't help very much with the sentence at large. But it's something!)
We also discussed brain and listening development up to this point and in the future, talked about the interaction between hearing aid and CI (which continues to evolve), thought about issues in quiet versus noise (still one of my biggest challenges), plus came up with some strategies for dealing with everyday situations and continuing my everyday listening practice. Every day that I wear the CI is practice! I need to remember that; all along I've been hard on myself for not doing enough structured listening. But my brain does pick up on meanings and nuances on its own, I still don't know how. One example: I was told today, and have been told by countless people at other times, that my speech has really noticeably improved since the CI. It's not that I spoke poorly before, just that my enunciation has smoothened out, become more regular, and my clarity and volume is the best it's been. Now, this is nice to hear, but it's not something that's happened consciously. I don't think more about my speech now than I did seven months ago. It's just my brain automatically and subconsciously correcting old habits to correspond with how I hear other people talk. How wild is that?
Finally, one of my big takeaway points is that, moving forward, building self-confidence will be key. Once I believe that I can do something, once I relax and smile and take it in stride, then listening comes easier and easier. This entire process of disproving my two-decade-old convictions is quite strange... But how wonderful to have a day where everything falls into perspective!
And, in many ways, it will continue to be my task for a while yet. CI rehab, if nothing else, is very individually motivated. I was pleased to find today that I've achieved a slew of milestones since July and September - things that were hard or impossible for me then are easy now. (Or, if not easy, then possible. That's still encouraging!) I could identify all of the major speech sounds, something which brought back memories of sitting in my house in July getting frustrated over "ah" and "oo" and wondering if this contraption would ever make sense. Ah, YES. Sentence and word identification, provided that I had a closed set, also turned out to be a relative breeze, even without a leading phrase for minimal-pair words. Open sets are still a struggle, not unexpectedly so, but I'm picking out bits and sounds throughout the sentences I'm given. (This is something I've noticed in everyday use, while sitting where I cannot lipread a person - I can catch the common words like "and," "but," "or," "I mean," "you know." Of course, this doesn't help very much with the sentence at large. But it's something!)
We also discussed brain and listening development up to this point and in the future, talked about the interaction between hearing aid and CI (which continues to evolve), thought about issues in quiet versus noise (still one of my biggest challenges), plus came up with some strategies for dealing with everyday situations and continuing my everyday listening practice. Every day that I wear the CI is practice! I need to remember that; all along I've been hard on myself for not doing enough structured listening. But my brain does pick up on meanings and nuances on its own, I still don't know how. One example: I was told today, and have been told by countless people at other times, that my speech has really noticeably improved since the CI. It's not that I spoke poorly before, just that my enunciation has smoothened out, become more regular, and my clarity and volume is the best it's been. Now, this is nice to hear, but it's not something that's happened consciously. I don't think more about my speech now than I did seven months ago. It's just my brain automatically and subconsciously correcting old habits to correspond with how I hear other people talk. How wild is that?
Finally, one of my big takeaway points is that, moving forward, building self-confidence will be key. Once I believe that I can do something, once I relax and smile and take it in stride, then listening comes easier and easier. This entire process of disproving my two-decade-old convictions is quite strange... But how wonderful to have a day where everything falls into perspective!
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