iCom and telecoil

Got to play with telecoil over the weekend. Works great! And there is far less buzzing/electrical interference with telecoil on while I'm near a computer. I pretty much have to put my ear right next to the computer to even hear the buzzing, so that's a big improvement from the Supero.

Tried out the iCom tonight for the first time. It works well for listening to music on the ipod or computer. But will I actually get one for myself? I have no idea. It's an accessory, Medicaid wouldn't cover it, so I'd have to come up with about $300 for the iCom. I'll keep trying it out, but so far I'm thinking I'll just stick with Telecoil, since I already have the MusicLink, and I also still have my neckloop for backup (for use on the computer, the plug-in jack is different on the neckloop so it won't plug into my ipod).

I have noticed that I do have to turn up the volume on the computer or ipod more with the icom. With tcoil, the volume setting is pretty low and I can hear the music just fine, lower than with the Supero.

Naida/Supero, captions

Had an audiology appointment today at 11:30. Audie fitted the new earmold for my left ear, attached it to my Supero hearing aid, and hey no feedback! Awesome. But it sure feels odd to have a hearing aid in the left ear. It's been so long, it just feels weird. And I can feel the earmold vibrating in my ear too. I had to turn the volume down on the Supero to reduce the earmold vibrating. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be hearing anything with the left ear, but we want to keep the auditory nerve simulated.

Also made a few adjustments to the Naida. Brought up the level on the SoundRelax feature to moderate (was on low before), so will see how that works now. Also put in a program for Speech in Noise, and modified it so the background noise would be reduced so I could hear speech in front of me (I asked about ZoomControl, and she had to call Phonak. Turns out one would need 2 Naida IXs for the ZoomControl feature, but she was able to modify the Speech in Noise so it'd be similar to the ZoomControl). Also had her turn on Telecoil on the hearing aid too, so when I get home I'll experiment with the MusicLink from TecEar and the ipod. She took the EasyPhone programming off, since I don't even use a phone, and put Telecoil in the EasyPhone spot, to see if putting the MusicLink to my ear will cause my hearing aid to switch to the Tcoil automatically. If not, no big deal.

She also loaned me the iCom to try out, as well. I'll definitely be doing some "experimenting" over the next 3 weeks with the Telecoil and iCom functions, and see which works best for me.

I'm quite happy with the Naida IX. Definitely a much better progress this time of adapting to it. No glitches or any of the problems like I experienced the V 2 years ago. I still continue to pick up on more sounds here and there.


Also, in the last few weeks, I've emailed the CW station about the lack of captions on their channel on my TV. I wasn't sure if it was the local CW channel doing that, or if it was a problem with the cable or what was going on. After chatting with Bresnan cable, I was able to turn on the Subtitles option on the cable box. But that still didn't do anything. CW channel was still captionless. So I asked some of my friends on Facebook if they got captions or not. One said no, and another said yes. I had the 2nd friend send me pictures of her cable box, to see if it was different. Indeed, she had a different box, the newer Pace box. After relay-calling Bresnan, they sent a tech guy out. I mentioned that my friend had the Pace box and got the captions, and he said he noticed that difference too. The older Motorola box just doesn't pick up the captions for the CW channel for some reason (which is odd, since the captions work fine on most other channels). But he took the old Motorola box out, and hooked up the new Pace box, and now the captions work great! Awesome. Now I should be able to enjoy watching Supernatural and Smallville once again. Of course, I need to get caught up, which I'll do at some point. I'm just happy to finally have captions for the CW channel again.