July 16th – two readers/their family members from this site had their surgeries! I hope they went well (I know one of them did!)
I finally got to order my harmony as well…but it’s going to take a 2-week turnaround to get it. At the rate Advanced Bionics is going with this, I won’t get it in the mail and activated till I return to school in September (which will make Mandy happy!)
July 19th – I hear a car accident for the first time with the cochlear implant. And from a block away. I was hanging out on the far side of the parking lot after work, talking to my boss as we usually do after every shift, when we hear this noise (which I didn’t know at first, but due to the expression on her face, I quickly figured it out). It sounded like a loud firecracker, due to the “boom!” that I heard. Pam says that the noise we first heard was probably the screech of the brakes, and then we looked up in time to hear the crash (she saw stuff flying through the air, I didn’t).
I was the first one to respond to the accident scene while Pam called 911 on her cell. It makes me sick that not one person who witnessed the accident stopped to help. The woman was bleeding, and her head hit the windshield, shattering it. To make the situation more interesting, the woman who hit her, left the scene and didn’t return till like 7 minutes later. I heard her car before I saw it, and was thinking “holy cow, somebody’s car really needs to go to the shop”. It was making clunking/chugging noises (half of the hood was smashed in).
I’ve never heard a car accident, not even with the hearing aid. I heard it distinctly with the cochlear implant, but my hearing aid did not pick it up at all. But Thursday was a really bad day overall (my friends/coworkers know why, and I thank everybody for their support and love).
Finally, I love meeting people with cochlear implants at work. It’s always fun to run into guests who have a cochlear implant, and then find out we have the same doctor. What I like more is hearing their stories about their implant experiences, especially if they’ve gone bilateral. 
WE GET THE NEW WALKIES TOMORROW (TUESDAY) AT WORK! Must bring my various cables so I can plug it in directly into my cochlear implant and find out which one works the best…that’s going to be a fun experiment…I can’t wait! 
I finally uploaded a video clip of me playing the piano – “The Gypsy Baron” by Johann Strauss. I’m still working on finding my other audio clips of my piano playing…or rerecording them as a video, but I’m out of practice, my piano needs to be tuned, and the humidity makes one of the major keys stick.
Make that a third reader with a recent surgery – mine was July 18th. I’m still pretty dizzy, but otherwise things went swimmingly. Turn-on is August 8th!
Ian!
Whee! I had been wondering what happened with you since I haven’t talked to you since school let out (and I know your school is on a different schedule than mine).
Last we talked online, the surgery was set for the end of May, but what happened to push it up to July? And I hope the dizziness goes away soon, and that it doesn’t turn out to be like anything like my case.
But I’m thrilled to hear it went well for you.
Haven’t seen you online (but then again, I’ve been MIA from the internets myself.
) we need to catch up soon because I want to hear what you’ve been up to, and what surgery day was like.
And that is so weird, our dates are like practically on top of each other…july 18/aug 8 for you, and july 19/aug 7 for me.
Are you getting two harmonies?
Hang in there and get well soon!
~Allison
Just the one Harmony, for now – I was sort of interested in going bilat, but my surgeon only does that with little kids. Sensible, I suppose, given that I’m (somewhat) functional with one hearing aid. And she’s willing to talk about a second implant in a year or so, so that may happen in the future.
The vertigo is almost gone. Whew! It hits me now and then – in the morning, especially – but it should be gone soon. And I’m seeing the surgeon tomorrow to get some packing removed from my ear (they patched the ginormous hole in my eardrum while I was under).
I’m trying to get a blog set up on my server since I want to record this whole experience – I’ll send you a link when it’s up. In the meantime, the short version of why the surgery was delayed was that they couldn’t guarantee that they’d be able to keep me breathing if they put me under. They tried a workaround on my original surgery date in May, but had to abort. They came up with some fallback options, but since I was already pretty drugged up, I wasn’t legally competent to consent to it. But finally I ended up with a nice chunk of metal in my head!