I was really looking forward to a new Map since most people seem to get a bunch of them right away after their activation and here it had been 16 days before I got my first new one. Even so, and even after 15 years of hearing tests, I was nervous about the testing they would put me through. I even told my audi, please, no words or sentences today? Just beeps? Right.
So she tested my residual hearing first with ear inserts. My right ear (implanted) is still not quite back to a normal tympanogram and I can feel some fluid in there still. It’s only been 3 weeks since surgery, no surprise. So there’s still a chance more residual hearing will come back to that ear, hard to tell yet. It is already a lot better than when they tested it 5 days after surgery.
The beeps with the CI were played through a speaker in the corner of the booth and were harder than I expected. I suppose a hearing test is always hard since you have to struggle to hear the quietest you can hear. I still have tinnitus which makes listening for the beeps harder than it should be. Tinnitus always seems louder during this testing than any other time.
After creating this new audiogram my audi asked me to do some sentences for her. Pretty sure she said “just try” and well what am I going to do? Refuse? The voice was a very strong male and the sentences were a mile long some of them. This was my first “CUNY” test. I wish they had done it before so I could compare. The next test (“just try one more?”) was HINT sentences which I had done before. I was surprised at how quiet the voice was and I missed the first few sentences completely before I got into it. With sentences I usually get something so I was surprised that I couldn’t hear a single word in some of them. I still scored 34%. My HINT scores pre-CI for that ear was 16% (though with both ears it was close to 60%). And then one final test, the single syllable CNC words. I managed to get 8%.
The funny thing about the CNC words especially is that my database is broken. You see, I always take a guess at the word. Even though each word sounded like ‘blah’ to me, I would guess (except ‘cute’ sounded like cute). I had a database of words in my head that matched each ‘blah’ that I heard and I usually scored 20% or so. Now, with the implant, the ‘blah’ that I’m hearing is more like ‘sqckt’ and I don’t have any idea how to guess that word! I’m hoping that my hearing improves enough that I don’t have to come up with a new list of imaginary words for my database, but time will tell.
I really try to avoid seeing the lists for any of these tests at all costs for fear of skewing the results. Any time they start the HINT test with the list that begins with ‘The boy fell from the window’ I ask for a new list.
