What is Hard (Versus What is Easy)

So easy sometimes to make some amount of progress and then realize how far you have to go. What is more, so thought-provoking sometimes to reflect on progress itself in terms of what is hard and what is easy.

Things are easy now that weren't before. In auditory therapy this past week, I got several strings of words as long as 11 or 12. And got them perfectly. My auditory memory was working overload and could barely regurgitate them before the whole string vanished entirely, but... 12 words?! That's a really big deal. The other day while riding I heard (and, more importantly, understood) my coach yell directions across the arena to another rider. I grasp full sentences over the PA more and more often at horse shows. It's easier to relax in daily situations with noise; no longer is it so jarring and strange.

Still, the moments of clarity notwithstanding, much of listening is still a matter of fighting for every scrap of information I get. It's pulling myself up a sheer rock face by my fingertips. It's teasing something small and slippery out of a hole it doesn't want to leave. And then I get my prize and, tired and a bit proud of myself, look around at the world around me and feel abashed. What I have just accomplished is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared with what's possible with sound.

Really, the thing about hearing that makes me marvel is how, when it's working properly and all circuits are firing, it's all rather easy. This never struck me too much before the CI; listening and hearing was just something I didn't do, something I relegated to the realms of hearing people. I never considered how it works. Think about it. Sound waves compress, travel through the air, enter your head through two small holes, make a series of bones shift and membranes vibrate and nerve cells pulse - and then the brain calculates the frequencies and combines them and evaluates what they mean. And then you understand and respond within an instant. It's astounding. I watch my hearing peers and marvel at how easy everything is. How thoughtless. It feels beautiful, in a way. Picking up the phone while driving, or otherwise multitasking, and having a rapid-fire conversation with your mother. Navigating through overlapping voices, engaging in high-speed banter. Sitting in a noisy, dimly lit restaurant at a large table and speaking across to someone five seats away and somehow - I have no idea how - picking up on their voice shooting at you amidst the din. Isolating that voice and recognizing it and holding on to its coherence. There's a peculiar kind of intimacy about those kinds of daily exchanges. I've been watching such things lately and wondering, now that I have some vague sense of that facility of auditory access, what they would feel like for me. Honestly, it fills me with an unexpected feeling of wonder.

And then I think of myself, inching up my rock face. That sense of difficulty versus ease: the moments that it occurs to me are the moments that I feel farthest away from hearing-world immersion, because what is most arduous for me is most thoughtless for them. I want it to be easy, as easy as fitting together words and writing them on the page, and I know that it will never be. I want to know what easy feels like. Gliding in and out of sound and, most importantly, meaning. Dancing with the facility of words. This may be what I'm thinking of - and then I remind myself how many other things in my life are wonderfully, unbelievably, laughably easy. And then I stop and, indeed, have to laugh a little.

But because something is hard doesn't mean that it is less worthy of joy. It was hard, but I did it, versus It was easy, but I did it. In both cases, I'm left with simply, I did it. And that doing is enough, at whatever level it takes place. Here's to not taking our skills and actions for granted. And here's to "it" - listening, hearing, understanding, communicating - becoming easier and easier. :)

To the Mattresses

As I think was apparent in my last post, this is where the real work begins - or continues! My time after returning from a quarter abroad was largely a time for me to regroup, to literally and figuratively catch my breath, and I did little structured listening outside of a few covered-mouth conversations. Leading up to my remapping two weeks ago (which, in a nutshell, readjusted the electrode input and gave me a new program with a noise-reduction filter, which has been amazing for loud/distracting/overwhelming places like restaurants - I find that I can make out individual voices from among the hubbub!), I was content to let things glide along for a bit.

But now that I've returned to the structure of classes and the college lifestyle, I'm a bit more motivated to pick up the listening-exercises pace again. This is especially true after jumping back into an environment in which I'm surrounded by hearing people who: 1) unthinkingly assume that my abilities will be up to "normal-person" par, 2) ask me how the hearing is going (a natural question to ask, since I haven't seen them for so long) and therefore make me want to stay in practice, or 3) seem to have no idea how much my life has changed in the last six months, making me feel simultaneously dismayed and gleeful. Yes, a complicated mix, but that's the way things go.

So, I'm dogged again. The audiobooks are back. Appointments with an auditory therapist are upcoming. In class I challenge myself to listen, really listen, to the professor and predict what he/she says before the interpreter signs it. (Amusingly, this has brought up several instances where I notice that the interp has misstepped or paraphrased. Score!) Phone conversations - after literally a three-month hiatus - are working their way into my daily schedule.

These conversations have been the hardest part. They're not "conversations," per se, in that when my parents call we're not talking normally about anything. Rather, they're structured listening exercises, often accompanied by computer instant messages out of necessity. The usefulness of technology. Talking on the phone is way harder than talking in person, mainly because the range of frequencies inherent to human speech is literally compressed over the connection. Hence, speech doesn't sound like what I'm used to. It doesn't sound as dynamic and lifelike. People tend to sound far away, whispery or muffled, or just plain strange. Complicating the problem is the fact that I have absolutely no real previous phone experience with hearing aids to fall back on. I'm using the phone for the first time in my life. And sitting in a room by myself with a receiver pressed to my ear, straining to decipher the disembodied voice from the other end, is a real whoa! moment. It feels unnatural, I almost don't believe that I can do it, I start to panic, and the vicious cycle begins.

But, as with everything else, I've found that practice is key. Three days this week I've gone to the mattresses with the phone. The first time (also my first time since September, mind you) I was a wee bit too ambitious, and ended up feeling shaken, to say the least. Tonight I was actually smiling, picking up on impromptu bits and sometimes finding myself able to automatically reply. A bit like doing headstands at times, but the confidence that practice brings is astonishing.

Now, what happens when I do this every day? I can't wait!

The Extreme Usefulness of Computer-Generated Listening Exercises

Over the last few weeks and months, most of my concentrated listening practice, aside from reading audiobooks, has consisted in using a computer program from Cochlear. Called "Sound and Way Beyond," it has a fairly wide range of listening exercises, from background noise appreciation to voice differentiation and word/sentence recognition to music appreciation and pure-tone discrimination. All of these have been helpful tools for me to practice with, but honestly - whoever came up with this program had to be a bit odd, to say the least. I'd much rather sit down with a real person and try to listen in a real, applicable context, instead of putting up with some of the ludicrously random things the program throws at me. A few gems:

From the environmental sounds module:

- A snowboard. Maybe for an Olympic skier - but really, this noise is that important?

- A person saying, "Ouch." Thus enabling me to immediately recognize and help someone in need.

- An elephant trumpeting. Because, you know, in real life this might save me from being inadvertently trampled.

- A bat noise. Ditto; can't be too careful about those bats.

- Tree falling. Again, computer program is helping me avoid life-or-death situations.

- Dentist drill. This one isn't as ridiculous as the others, but it's a bit traumatizing.


From the word discrimination module:

- In the color category: amethyst, camel, garnet, ochre, vermilion. Because I use these words oh so often.

- In the family category: fraternal, heir, Dutch uncle. Creative.

- In the time category: everything from a mere "two o'clock" to sunset and Mountain Standard Time and the Ides of March. Try to take it all in, why don't you.


From the everyday sentences module (note emphasis on the word "everyday"):

- "A zestful food is the hot cross bun."

- "Dispense with a vest on a day like this." Yes, because everybody talks like that.

- "It's a dense crowd in two distinct ways."

- "The slang word for whiskey is booze." All right, so someone might say this to me in college.

- "Smile when you say nasty words."

- "Note closely the size of the gas tank." Hmmm, impending explosion?

- "Pluck the bright rose without leaves."

- "The rope will bind the seven books at once." This doesn't even make any sense.

- "Thieves who rob friends deserve jail."

- "Always close the barn door tight." Finally, something that almost relates to my life.

It's helpful in theory, but how on earth is some of this supposed to be practical? And shouldn't practicality be the main point right now? (Yes, at least the minds behind this program were creative. Props to them.)