Early last year we started investigating the idea of adding a second cochlear implant because we were having issues with my daughter being able to hear us when we were talking to her. She was having a hard time hearing when there was a bunch of back ground noise and while we would try to carry on a conversation in the car. As a mom this bothered me because she is old enough to start driving. In fact, she recently started working on her Drivers Education packet and we wanted to make sure that she could adequately hear the other cars, motorcycles, and things going on around her while she is operating a motor vehicle. My daughter had surgery in June and had her second implant activated in early July. Things were looking good but it has been a very slow process.
It has been over 16 years since my daughter’s auditory nerve has been stimulated so there is a possibility that the second implant might not be as effective or it may take a while for the brain to learn how to translate the signals. My daughter told the audiologist that she was hearing mostly static out of her left cochlear implant. The audiologist said that it was very normal to hear static. During her appointment on Friday the audiologist ran some tests on her cochlear implant to determine if the auditory nerve was firing and that the device was working properly. The test showed that her actual hearing levels were higher and she discovered that her cochlear implant programming from August was way too low. The audiologist said that at this point that we needed to be a bit more aggressive and work towards improving my daughter’s program levels.
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My daughter complains that she gets headaches if she is overstimulated. In fact, several weeks ago I found her cochlear implant laying on the bathroom counter one afternoon while she was at school. I had to explain to her that she had to wear her cochlear implant all the time if she expects to see an improvement in her hearing.
The audiologist also took her into the hearing booth to test her hearing levels on the left side only. She said that my daughter was hearing sounds in the normal hearing range and hopefully she should start hearing speech sounds from her left cochlear implant.
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