A Measure of Progress

Today was my three month CI evaluation. The evaluation was basically the same as the initial candidacy evaluation. There is a sound awareness test, a CNC (single syllable word) test, and two different sentence tests. Today's results were mostly a mixed bag.
Pre-op, with a hearing aid, my sound awareness results started at 40 dB at 250 Hz, and rapidly dropped to 75 dB at 4 kHz. Today, I tested between 25-30 across the entire range. These results are pretty typical (I should scan the two charts, so I can post them here).
The CNC test was the hardest most disappointing. Pre-op, I scored only 2% correct. Today, I scored only a 6% correct. Not much if any, improvement. This test is also scored by phoneme (i.e. if the word was dog, and I said bog, they score partial credit for getting the -og). Last year, I got about 10% scoring by phoneme. Today, I got 24% when scored by phonemes. It looks like I'm hearing a lot more of the sounds than I did before, but my brain is still struggling to assemble them into the words.
Finally, on the sentence tests, last year, I scored 5 and 7%. Today, I scored 20 and 34%, repectively. A bit more improvement. One thing that my audiologist pointed out to me on the sentence tests is that, while they don't score it, she saw that I did better with words at the beginning of a sentence than, in the last part of the sentence. Possibly, I'm concentrating so much on getting the first words, that by the time I figure those out, the rest of the sentence is spoken, and I've missed it.
Some other points my audiologist made today whle telling me not to get too hung up on the numbers: -Three months is very little time compared to the 30+ years of hearing loss. -A recorded voice, with no lip reading, and few contextual clues is not a good indicator of how well I communicate everyday.
While I'm not too disappointed with today's numbers (I couldn't have done much worse than I did last year), I was still kind of surprised that they weren't a bit higher. It seems I'm doing much better in the auditory rehab sessions: Even when we do open set sentence exercises (with no lip reading), I seem to do much better, missing only a few of them.