Some progress

Yesterday was Mother's Day. I went over to my mom and stepdad's house to spend time with my momma! A couple of different times, I turned off my hearing aid so I could use the implant alone for practice. Mom and I talked on the bench swing in the backyard, and as long as I could lipread her, I was able to make sense of what she was saying (although she did have to repeat here and there). My sister, her husband and their son came over too. At one point my sister and mom got to talking of making some pepper poppers, and I clearly heard my mom say (while she was several feet away by the grill) "let's make some!" and I clearly heard my sister say "I'll help!". I didn't even look at my sister when she said that, but I knew what she said. That was pretty exciting!

Everything still sounds electronic at this point.  But I am hearing voices, they just sound electronicish. My bro-in-law asked if he sounded like a robot, and I said yeah, kind of. He thought that was pretty cool.  I don't really exactly know what robots sound like, but hey ok! But yeah, electronic voices, electronic everything.

I also ordered "Sound and Way Beyond" from Cochlear (it's $25 from their webstore, plus shipping/handling), so I have another resource for auditory training. It arrived in my mailbox last Thursday, and I wasn't expecting to see it until sometime this week. But hey! I played with it a bit on my laptop. The tones portion, that one was really tricky. Some tones I couldn't even hear at all, and at times they all sounded too similar I couldn't tell which one was the different sounding one.  But the environmental sounds, and the difference between male/female voice, I didn't do too bad with. That's all I've done so far with Sound and Way Beyond, but I'll work with it some more. I don't use my laptop for auditory rehab on a daily basis, it depends on my mood and how mentally tired I am.

I've been very slowly making progress with the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland audiobook. Before the mapping on April 23, I made it to Chapter 5. But when I would try to follow along with Chapter 5 (I was also reading along with the Kindle app on my laptop), boy oh boy I just kept getting lost so quickly and easily. Over and over and over, I'd try again, changing the volume and the speed of the speaker's voice, and just couldn't do it.  But last week I gave it another try, and I was able to get through Chapter 5! At a few spots I kind of got lost, but was able to pick up again with the next sentence. Will have to keep going and get through the whole book before my audiobook rental expires again.

Am up to Program 3 on the Harmony right now, so soon enough I'll switch over to the Neptune and work my way through the 3 programs on that. When I get to Program 2 on the Neptune, then I will FedEx the Harmony to the audie and she'll load up more programs on it for me.