Activation

October 28 was activation day for my cochlear implant. What can I say, it was a pretty underwhelming event. Not that I really expected otherwise, but you read enough stories of people that adapt so quickly, you can't help but hope you're going to be one of them. We got to the clinic at the University of Minnesota a bit early, so we had a short wait. When my audiologist was finally ready,we went back to her office for activation.

The first step was to plug the processor into her computer, and test the strength of the head piece magnet on my head. The default magnet was a bit too weak to hold the coil in place. My audiologist didn't have a stronger magnet matching the color of my head piece, so she promised to order one, but gave me a brown magnet to use in the meantime. After putting the processor on my ear, and positioning the head piece, she ran a diagnostic on all of the electrodes in the implant. All 22 electrodes passed.

The next step was to establish my threshold and comfort levels. We went through each electrode one at a time. Starting with very soft volumes, and gradually increasing the volume, I had to tell her when I heard the tone. After establishing the threshold for each electrode, we went back and for each one, she increased the volume, and I had to tell her when the volume was loud, but comfortable. After both those steps, she showed me the graph, and I had a pretty narrow dynamic range: Fairly high thresholds, and low comfort levels, especially at the higher frequencies.

Finally, the big moment came, and after unplugging me from the computer, she turned me on to the outside world. At first, it didn't seem like I was hearing anything more than static. After a few moments, I was finally able to discern my audiologists "voice." Not because I recognized anything as speech, but because I realized that i was hearing beeps that corresponded with her speaking. I also couldn't really pick out any sounds from the background hum that I was hearing, and everything was more or less a monotone sound.

We tried some speech introductions, where she made some simple speech sounds: sh, aaa, eee, ooo, while pointing at them, and with me watching her lips. Then we tried it with her shielding her mouth, and I had to point at the sound I heard on a paper. Didn't get a single one. Next we did the same thing with some simple two syllable words: airplane, toothbrush, baseball, etc. I think I got one right.

Finally, we went through all of the items in the suitcase from Cochlear.

There were five boxes inside. One for the documents, one for the two processors, one for the batteries and battery charger, one for accessories, and one for the dry and store. There was also a carrying case for the processors, and a keychain battery case.

The accessories include two personal audio cables that allow me to plug things like computers, iPods, etc. directly into the processor. One is for devices that plug into an outlet, and the other for those that are battery powered. There is also a lapel microphone that is supposed to help in noisy environments.

After some discussion of what I could expect over the next couple of days before my next appointment, we were on our way.

The campus is so noisy, especially around Washington Ave., with all of the trucks and buses, I expected to be overwhelmed by sound, but it still didn't seem like I was hearing anything above that constant hum I was hearing. Over the next day or so, I had the same experience with running water in my kitchen sink and the sinks in the lab at work. At first I thought maybe there were frequencies that were canceling each other out, but I later was told that it is a result of the compression feature of the processor. If a sound gets too loud, the processor will actually compress it to prevent the signal from overwhelming me.

By later in the afternoon, there was only one sound that I started to pick out of the background: I could "hear" the blinkers in my car. I put that in quotes because it wasn't really what you would call a sound. What I was detecting was more of a warble in that background hum. Speech was still not much more than the beeps I initially heard, though the beeps did seem to start stretching out more, so that the pattern and cadence started to be more recognizable as speech.

And that was pretty much my first day of "hearing."