More on the Med El DUET hybrid CI and on my CI
I was going to add this to the previous post but decided to start a new one here: Hearing preservation was a goal of mine and my surgeon going into my CI surgery. We did implant the worse of my two ears, but I had a fairly significant amount of hearing in the lower frequencies. As a musician I’ve found that hearing aids work pretty well for music, so why not try to save that hearing? They used the MedEl Medium electrode which contains 12 electrode pairs spaced more closely than the normal MedEl deep insertion electrode. For me, the electrode array was only inserted to 10 of the electrodes as deep as 20mm in order to save my low frequency hearing. Even so, this should give me plenty of stimulation from the CI alone. On a related note, I finally understand...
Pre-Op Appointment and Insurance
Monday was my 2nd visit to UNC Chapel Hill. Everyone down there was highly anticipating that night’s Basketball game (not something I was following). Sunday afternoon Don and I drove down and went to the house of my older cousin and his wife. My older cousins and I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to be close, and Doug asked me if I’m taller than before… kind of funny when you’re 29. We decided that we must spend a lot of time sitting down when we see each other. We had a lovely evening with them just talking and catching up. It was the first time Don had met either of them and the first time I had met Doug’s wife. I hope they will come visit us some time. 3.5-4 hours isn’t that far. If not, I’ll be back down...
Benefits of EAS
Benefits of EAS Originally uploaded by sajego This chart is from a paper I just read. It basically shows that in their study people with a CI benefited quite a bit from using a hearing aid in the unimplanted ear, even with hearing only at 125 Hz.
Hearing Preservation
Today I came across http://hearingpreservation.com, a website for an annual conference on what it sounds like – hearing preservation. The abstracts from last year’s conference in Kansas City are online in a pdf file, and while most are only one page, and many go over my head by using technical terms for anontomy of the ear that I am not familiar with, there’s a lot that’s interesting to read. I’ve sent a couple of emails to the presenters asking if they would share the whole presentation they gave with me. I think this one sums up the whole phenomomena of hearing preservation in cochlear implant recipients. Mean CNC word recognition performance was 76 and 86 percent in the electric only and bimodal conditions, respectively. The...
First trip to UNC
The drive down yesterday, Sunday 3/1, was awful! There was a severe snow storm for the 60 miles between Lynchburg and Danville, VA and we were crawling along at 25 mph seeing cars slid off the road into the ditch every half mile. I looked at the radar map as we were heading into the bad snow and it looked like it would be rain once we got to Danville, but those maps have failed me before! I was really glad it was right this time. Still, the whole trip took almost 5.5 hours. We only got lost in the last mile or two when route 54 cloned itself and we ended up on the other side of campus than I expected. The iPhone GPS confirmed and we made it. We stayed at the Carolina Inn, something of a UNC institution I guess. I had read about it and friends...
Welcome
I'm a 30-something year old girl originally from upstate NY and now living in central Virginia. My background is in mechanical engineering and I worked full time as an engineer for 8 years. In 2010 I quit my job and started a laser engraving business.
I lost my hearing at age 14 and have been using hearing aids since then. In April 2009 I received my first cochlear implant. That went really well so in December 2009 I got the second. The CIs are what prompted me to start writing publicly - but I try to cover other things as well.
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