Going bi-lateral with a hearing aid in the profound ear.

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Phi4Sius

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Well, it's been interesting.

1. I'm getting all sorts of sound sensations (not anything auditory yet). This means I have a viable hearing nerve (it's not completely dead), at least one of the requirements to attain good results with a CI!

2. When I take off my right hearing aid, I can hear the left hearing aid BEEP. That's all that's auditory, however. Everything else is a sensation of sound.

3. I have sound awareness on my left side now. I have some minor directionality that I didn't have before. I can certainly tell the difference between when I have my left HA on and when it's off.

According to my audie it will take 8-12 weeks for the hearing nerve to return to full function.

At the very least, if this is all that comes of what I'm "hearing", I've confirmed that I at least have a viable, functioning nerve to obtain good results with a Cochlear Implant. :D

The only thing I know now is that I really want more. I want everything that's possible via auditory signals through my right ear and left ear. So, most likely I'll end up going through with a CI. My newly re-scheduled appt. with the insurance company audiologist (to verify my hearing loss and hopefully move forward with the CI candidacy process) is on June 15th.
 
Hopefully when your auditory nerve awakens, you find you are actually hearing great in the left ear! If you are able to hear the beep, you have alot more residual hearing than what your audiogram suggests.

As for CI, ive never seen any insurance approve when one ear hears 100% speech. They require the contralateral ear to be no better than 60% speech. But if your insurance approves, you will be the first case ive ever seen. If insurance doesn't approve, would you spend the $50,000 out of pocket or just wait for stem cell treatment?

If I had a bad ear, id try to get approved by insurance for a CI in that ear. But I have two half decent ears and I am not willing to possibly give up my residual hearing. My audiologist to date has not seen anyone whos gotten CI keep their residual hearing. Id be alot more interested when I start seeing the majority of CIborgs keep their residual hearing. But anyway good luck and keep us to date on your HA progress.

Look what I found:

The number of electrodes as well as the spacing between the electrodes affects the place resolution for coding frequencies. In principle, the larger the number of electrodes, the finer the place resolution for coding frequencies. Frequency coding is constrained, however, by two factors which are inherent in the design of cochlear prosthesis: (1) number of surviving auditory neurons that can be stimulated at a particular site in the cochlea, and (2) spread of excitation associated with electrical stimulation. Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done about the first problem, because it depends on the etiology of deafness. Ideally, we would like to have surviving auditory neurons lying along the length of the cochlea. Such a neuron survival pattern would support a good frequency representation through the use of multiple electrodes, each stimulating a different site in the cochlea. At the other extreme, consider the situation where the number of surviving auditory neurons is restricted to a small area in the cochlea. In that situation, a few electrodes implanted

So how well you hear with a CI depends on how viable your auditory nerve is.
 
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That's great news! That your nerves working :) my unimplanted ear get little bit of sensation from sound and only low frequency I can hear with hearing aid and that ear have 85 db in one frequency (1000hz) and the rest is 100-115 area, so I have tiny bit of hearing, and you are almost completely deaf in that ear (115 to NA) so its understandable that it don't really hear that much lol. But still its working! I think if you got CI and the activation'd be overwhelming because you'll hear all frequencies it'll sound really funny, beeping at every sound that's coming in and really weird, the audi probbaly will start you off on low and increase threshold level over time until you're comfortable hearing above 40 db maybe even 20!

Deafdude, enough... saying it once is good enough don't go saying hes more likely won't get ci cuz he get 100% speech comprehension in ALL of his threads and some of his posts more than once, are you his audiologist? No are you his insurance? No stop trying to bring him down or try to make him to be only ha user, he want ci and his audiologist support the idea, its his body and if audi and surgeon are willing to implant and insurance will cover, let him get it, so he get 2 best sounds input, much better than just 1 ear getting audiory input.
And also its very reasonable to get that ear implanted because if tested for speech comprehension in that ear alone it'd be 0 and only getting sensation and beep from 1 sound, so its perfect candidate for CI in that ear alone. So what if the other ear's getting great speech comprehension, is that ear getting implanted? No so let it go.
 
Wow I love the idea of people getting bilaterals!! It gives them two ears instead of one and more hearing!! Good luck
 
wish I could be bilateral with hearing aids, but nope. Left ear is completely 100% DEAF, even hearing aids are useless. On hearing tests, 0 response ever time at every pitch of sound. But maybe, just maybe, the cochlear implant is an option for the left ear. I shall be finding out for sure tomorrow!

At least I'm happy I have one ear that manages with a hearing aid (for the most part, with sime difficulties).
 
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