Patchwork Girl's Rambling Warps
Sunday, December 01, 2013
      ( 11:30 PM ) Jessica  
Back in June, I went for an evaluation to see about getting a cochlear implant (CI from now on).... fast forward almost 6 months: tomorrow I go in for an MRI to check the condition of my cochlea or whatever they need to do the MRI for. Then I'll have a meeting with the doctor a couple of hours later. I'll be taking a sedative when I get there... since Gary has to work, I'll be spending the day in Dallas or maybe Denton or both..hopefully the sedative will have mostly worn off by the time I get to the doctor's office.

I've read a few blogs, I've looked at the literature that the audiologist at Southwestern gave me for Cochlear, Advanced Bionics and Med El. I really hope that when I see the doctor tomorrow, I won't have to tell him which company I want to go with because I don't know yet... but I will ask which they do the surgery for the most, etc... see if I can get a feeling for which company they find to be most successful.

IF the MRI goes well and I'm able to have the surgery, (yes, I'm being careful with expectations), but from what I'm reading, the success of the process depends on how much effort I put into the process.

Important considerations to me are: being able to follow conversations better and to be able to hear music better than I can now and maybe play music again.

It would be nice to be able to talk on the phone sometimes. I think the last time I tried, we were in Wichita Falls and I had a few errands to run while the others were doing something else. When they were done, they went to a restaurant and I tried to call them to find out WHICH restaurant and WHERE it was because for some reason text messages were not getting through, so I had to call... I finally had to snag a stranger on the street for help. Right around the time that I got over to the restaurant, I got all of the backed up messages. Arrrgh!

The last time I tried using the relay on the phone, the relay operator was very impatient..  I don't text anywhere NEAR as fast as I type, and one or two times I had to explain that I text slowly, blah blah blah... too frustrating. I suppose I could have used voice carryover... hmm. The last time I did that was when I was in the hospital when my twins were born...

If I still need to lipread, that is fine: I'd just like to be able to lipread AND hear the speaker without a hearing aid squealing its ass off and annoying everyone in the room... turning my hearing aid helps me with some people, but the darned squealing...

I'd like to (eventually, once I get past the chipmunk or mickey mouse or other odd initial sounds) know what people's voices sound like... and it would be NICE to hear my youngest son's voice before it starts to crack! <grin> (Maybe I should make everyone do some recordings, huh?) It would be nice to be able to actually hear the cats meowing... one of our cats apparently has a very quiet or maybe even silent meow. I'd like to know that for myself since when he does meow, it looks like he's yelling because he opens his mouth so big!

I'm gonna stop writing for now so I can go read some more CI blogs and find some links that compare the 3 companies that make CI equipment. The literature that was given to me back in June is mostly "pick me! pick ME! I'm the best!" I hate that type of advertising... oh well.

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Welcome to Patchwork Girl's Rambling Warps blog... where I talk about just about anything from projects to just stuff to rants and whatever... I started blogging here on July 31st, 2002 and have been blogging on my website with Movable Type. I do not promise to blog regularly! I will blog when I feel like:

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