Quote:
Originally Posted by deafdude1
CI is great for people like you with very profound hearing loss. Ive read some of your other threads. You said you didn't have enough residual hearing to hear with HAs so you stopped wearing them. Was the audiologist even able to record any responses on your audiograms before you got CI? I am just curious what db loss you had. My own audiologist puts the loss at 120db as the point where HAs cease to be of any benefit.
You can see how I feel about CIs from my blog in my sig. I am not against CIs, just against all the hype CIs have gotten in the last 2-3 years. Nowdays people see CIs as something they "gotta have" as the "latest and greatest" or to "upgrade" from their HAs which are already giving them plenty of benefit. Alot of people have unrealistic expectations nowdays, ive posted a thread about this woman who hears worse with CI than HA. But in your case, you had nothing to lose and the only risk was the surgery itself.
Not everyone gets good speech comphrension, although postlinguals have better odds of improved speech. I am superb at reading lips and can get 80% to 95% of the words from a person who speaks as clear as I do. I don't struggle with speech. lip reading is another way I gain access to speech. I can hear most environmental sounds and I have enough residual hearing that my audiologist feels I won't see any improvements with CI over HA so he doesn't recommend CI for me or anyone with equal or more residual hearing than me.
|
Well I can remember from looking at my Lion's Camp application (where they ask about the hearing loss) when I was 10 years old, that I had a 115 dB loss at the time from the audiogram from the year before. I do not remember what loss I had the time my dad took me to have the mandatory hearing test, no one told me. But it was probably the same or worse because that was a few months after I had gone to Lion's Camp.
When I was going though the candidacy process for a CI I remember not responding to any sound except one in my left ear at the very end of the test, so I was probably already up to 120 dB at that point. I didn't ask how much my loss at the time was because I already had known that I pretty much couldn't hear shit anymore with hearing aids.
I had gotten sick with chicken pox as a baby and thus lost a lot of my hearing, and even though I wore hearing aids on up til I was 10 and could hear voices and other sounds when I was much younger, I never had any speech comprehension (without lipreading) thus why I don't understand speech at all with a CI now. If you stood speech with your hearing aids (or before you began to lose your hearing) before you had a CI you are much more likely to possibly understand speech with your CI because your brain still remembers the speech sounds, but it does not always happen. It's just that there is some more success with those who has had speech comprehension (without lipreading) before they had been implanted than those who never understood speech before they got implanted. It has to do with your auditory memory, I believe. There are no guarantees, though.
I cannot lipread very well unless the person is also signing - I only use lipreading to discriminate between several words that has the same sign to lessen the confusion, because otherwise I get the wrong idea.
With the CI I can hear quite a lot - I can hear at an average of 24 dB across the board, but I sometimes do not hear some things sometimes because either my auditory nerve had not picked up on it yet at this point or because I get so engrossed into something that I tune out some sounds, or some sounds just get lost while in a place with a lot of environmental noises. In my earlier post I said that I could not hear cars until a couple months after my activation, and this is one of the examples. My auditory nerve just wasn't picking up on the car noises until that day, and it had caught me off guard and very surprised.
For those of you who are curious as to what I can hear at different frequencies at this point (I hope this comes out looking right as I am not up to scanning my CI audiogram results onto the computer):
HZ: 250 - 500 - 1000 - 2000 - 3000 - 4000
-----25 ----25----25-----25------20-----35
Average dB: 24 dB SAT: 15
When I first got activated my average was at 34 dB across the board and now it is 24 dB across the board. Not sure what SAT means, as I forgot to ask the CI audiologist what it meant.
But despite what the audiogram says, it doesn't mean I can hear everything at that low dB level - I eventually hear these things after a while, like with cars. I have not had any hearing aids in my ears since I was 10 years old and I got implanted when I was 26, so of course that is to be expected. Also the CI audiogram that I have just provided above, was done in the hearing test booth so of course my hearing outside the CI clinic would not be as good as inside the hearing test booth due to environmental sounds overlapping each other and other factors. The hearing test booth is considered a "perfect quiet place" for your audiogram but if you had your audiogram done outside in the parking lot of the CI clinic of course the CI audiogram you would end up with would be different cause sounds can get lost in various other environmental noises.
Someone said something about not hearing fingernails on chalkboards, but I don't know if I can hear that because I have never been in that situation where someone is scratching their nails on the board as I am not currently in school right now. But of course I hope I never hear that sound as I've heard it can be horrible.
Can you clarify what NR, SRT, SAT, SD and MCL means? I see these in your signature.
Of course, CI does not make one "hearing" - it can never make anyone "hearing" because when you take the CI coil off your head, you can't hear a damn thing anyway.