Uh Oh, lesson learnt.

I have been really good in the past 8 and half months since my activation day to carry my spare batteries. Mum used to nag me all my life to carry spare battery for my hearing aids but I always never bothered, why... For one I never really heard much through HA's and sometimes don't notice if they are flat and when they are flat I just take them out and leave in my pockets! 2nd thing... they last long time. One battery per Hearing aid used to last me 2 weeks at most so I didn't think i need to carry them all the time so I never paid attention to my mum's nagging.

The Cochlear Implant had changed my life because I took the sounds for granted and I love wearing it. THREE batteries for one implant lasts me 4 days. It gets shorter as my mappings/hearing improves over time.

I have been so busy lately and today is my first day to myself in weeks! Yesterday I was called into work as bit of emergency as we are expecting heavy rains the next 2 days so we needed to get the outside jobs done. While working I heard beep beep.... yep my Cochlear implant battery is going... ok I have half an hour before it goes completely flat... wrong it went FLAT in 5 mins, I think I missed the half hour warning as we were outside and it's windy. I ran to the office... can't find a packet of batteries, so went to the car, yay 2 packets... oh no they both are full of flat batteries. How stupid of me. I faced few hours of complete silence and whitewash noise in my other ear which is bearing a Hearing aid, no birds, no wind, no voices, no dog tags, just completely jumbled up sounds that made no sense at all.

Over few weeks my friends, collegues had noticed that they didn't need to tap my shoulder or shout to get my attention. Yesterday my collegue realised that my Hearing aid (in my other ear) isn't doing any justice and had to tap my shoulder. I felt despair! I was almost in tears and realised that my CI is very important part of my life and I must kick myself into gear and replace all the batteries in the car, my bag and leave couple of packets at work.

This made me realise that prospect of going Bilateral (cochlear implants for both ears), I would love to have 2, I think I would be perfect candiate for it BUT according to NICE guidelines which was renewed recently stating that I can't have another one unless I am under 19, visually impaired or phsyically disabled. Other soulution to this is to fund myself... I don't think so as each implant/device costs £40,000 roughly and there's after care for the rest of my life which could be around £3000 per year.

Oh well lets hope there is something better for my unimplanted ear soon.

Right off to collect old batteries and replacing them with spanking new packet plus an extra packet!

New CI moments...

For few weeks something was nagging me... I realised i couldn't hear my dog tags or the cultery noises in the sink.... things were sounding just so muffled, like it had lost it's clairty. So I emailed to Sarah my Audi who said i could see her the next day. It had been a record of 3 months since my last mapping!

Had hearing test, on the audiogram it had showed that my high freqency hearing had gone down on a long steep ski slope!! Sarah reckons that my brain had got used to it alot and it just went quieter quickly than usual. I am so glad I noticed it and I felt that i wasn't wasting anyone's time.

We had long tweaking, tuning and 3 hearing tests I am back to where I was but bit better clairty than before.... psst i could go on to 20db across the board but Sarah feels I am not ready for quiet sounds!! so she tweaked my CI back to 30/35db across the board. My dog tags is back. The cultery noise is back to my annoyance! Added some music software on to my programs for me to try out when listening through my Ipod.

My godness..... I could pick out Elton John "candle in the wind" ABBA "Mamma Mia" out of 15 songs straightaway without even looking!!! I was in awe, I couldn't believe it.

I was discussing with my collegue at work and then he made phone call to our boss, I OVER HEARD what they were talking about without lipreading... all this I knew what he was talking about since we already talked about it.

I like this mapping!

My 9 month review is on the 27th May and mum is coming home for it... it will be her first involvement to my mapping session and hearing tests since I was implanted.