Today, I had a mapping session to deal with some slight twitching I was experiencing. What we decided to do was lower the gain on two of the programs and made a new program with a small window so that background noise won’t be as pronounced. So far, so good. Once in a while, I’ll experience a CI moment such as a couple of days when me and Steph went for a walk. As we were walking, I heard a saw in the distance. This is something I would never hear with the hearing aid. I am also picking up on more speech recognition and I am hoping that with the new program, it will be much easier to carry a conversation in a crowd, noisy place like a restaurant. And I can also hear all of the various cell phones that go off in my office to a point where I can associate the ring-tones to the individual.
On the insurance front, things are progressing along. The ENT office is working to collect all of the information necessary to make an appeal case. And Steph has really been pushing the buttons with Univera for me. Hopefully, this won’t take long but its a good thing I started now so as to have everything in place by my scheduled surgery date in December 2007 or January 2008. One of the things we will be making a case for is the twitching. Right now all of the CI’s power is focused on one ear and this is contributing to the twitching I am experiencing. By going bilateral it will eliminate that by allowing me to balance out sound between two ears.
I got a tune-up today too…a few little tweaks that made my music on the way home sound much better, although still nothing like I remember. I am hoping that I’ll pick up a little more speech recognition in the next few weeks…we’ll see 🙂
My audiologist told me the other day that two of her BlueCross patients have been approved for bilaterals just in the past week. She says that she is going to use that to our advantage and try to make BlueCross cover mine. I have a surgery date for July 9th…we’re just waiting for the approval…if they deny it again we’ll just reschedule. I am “right-eared”…it’s odd, but even though my left ear is the one implanted, it seems that the sounds are coming in the right side…my brain is determined to make me hear out of that ear somehow…ha! 🙂