Mapping appointment - almost a year later

Hello family and friends,

I am currently at the Mayo Clinic, I just finished mapping (updating) my cochlear implant. It will be a year in August since I have been activated. This is the last season to experience with the implant and so far I am finding that there are birds chirping everywhere!

The past few months, I have felt like things were a little too quiet and noticed I started to use program two on my implant. This is the whisper program, which is increases the soft sounds in the environment, therefore it was the program I liked the best because it seemed louder than the other three programs. Lately, I have found myself a little more frustrated because I was not hearing well in noisy environments. I actually felt like I went backwards and was hearing like I still had my hearing aids on and straining to hear people. I found out that this is actually a terrible program to use when in loud places like in a school, party or noisy environment.

SO, I am VERY happy to finally have my implant readjusted and boosted! I am hearing things now! I am excited to be able to hear the sounds in my environment again. I didn't realize how much I was missing. Next time, I will not wait so long and go in to get remapped again. Usually when you are mapped, your volume is set at five then it will give you room to increase volume gradually to nine. So, I hit nine a month after I was adjusted last, so I been hearing too quiet for a while. Now, I am at volume three and have plenty of room to increase my volume if I want. It is fun to hear the littlest and most simple sounds again, such as people talking, walking nearby, faucet running and newspapers shuffling are a few I noticed greatly in the past 30 minutes. :) Also, I was able to improve the clarity of my implant as well, so we will see...

Thanks for reading!

Kristine