re-assessing and getting back on track

I haven't been writing over the last couple of weeks, and there is more of a reason than just laziness. I am doing this journal because I want documentation of this whole CI experience. Well, that includes the negatives as well as the positives, and I was feeling sad because I knew that meant I needed to chronicle my recent frustrations.

I am not a hearing person. I know this, and I accept it. I never thought the CI was going to make me a hearing person again. I know that is not the way it works. And yet, I have been having such immediate, rapid, amazing success that somehow it seems I started reacting to things like I am a hearing person. I had some experiences in April where I was not hearing certain things as well as I'd like to have heard them and it was making me angry. I mentioned the night I went out with Jeff's friends - Irene and others. I didn't really go into details, but I was a lot more frustrated that night than I let on. When I was in the midst of several people sitting around an apartment talking, I wasn't following a lot of it, and was back to my well-known feeling of being lost in the crowd. I was also completely exhausted that night, so that added into it.

Then on April 8th, I went to see a comedy show for the first time. It was held in a dive bar near our home. I was really expecting to hear well in that situation because of how I have been able to hear in other situations with microphones. I do pretty well in church, and also I went to this big lecture (which was actually about the education of children with cochlear implants) and understood almost 100% of it, sometimes without even looking at the speaker. I even took notes during that lecture! So, my expectations were high. The reality did not go so well. I could hear the comedian's voice, who happens to be Jeff's friend Pat. I could hear him the entire time he was talking, but I couldn't comprehend all the words. I would hear parts of each joke, enough words to form a phrases, but then not the next few words and then yes the next few words, and then no again. It was like "trying to pick up girls in a bar blah blah blah blah light her cigarette for her blah blah blah nickname Porkchop blah blah blah doesn't help me much blah blah blah." Then everyone in the bar was cracking up, except for me. And this happened again and again. It was highly frustrating. I didn't try to move to a place where I could watch Pat's face front on, instead of seeing his side profile like I was doing. I wanted to be working on hearing him, not using so much lipreading. But at the same time, I wasn't really working and using it as a listening exercise. I was just sitting there growing more pissed off that I couldn't understand the punchlines.

As soon as Pat was finished, I told Jeff I was leaving and walked home (we were only 5 minutes away.) It was crazy how upset I was. As I was walking, I began getting close to crying. When I arrived home, I immediately took a shower, because of the second problem of that night; that bar had zero ventilation and I had been suffocating in all that cigarette smoke. Anyway, in the shower, I really got to crying for a while and then I was furious with myself for being upset instead of just appreciating all the amazing things I am hearing now. Then I forced myself to calm down and start thinking about this, and analyzing what I was really so upset about. I believe it really boiled down to the fact that I have no experience being hard of hearing. When I lost my hearing, there was a few months of fluctuating hearing levels, and I did use a hearing aid for quite a while (I don't really remember what any of that was like anymore, though.) But essentially I plummeted rapidly from a hearing person to a profoundly deaf person. Then as soon as the CI was activated, it seemed like I was rapidly hearing so many things again. I really have no experience in what it is like to understand only some parts of what is being said, and to understand in some situations and not others, or to understand one person's voice and not another's, or not hear as well when I am tired as I did the day before when I was feeling energetic. This is a whole new world for me, and now 4 months post CI activation, I have started bumping into certain limitations and have to figure out how to settle down into them. I just have to get used to what I can and cannot do for now.

BUT... I am not just 100% accepting that what I am getting today is all I am going to get. I know that my rapid sucess started to allow me to be quite lazy. Lately, I have not been practicing enough, or hard enough. I need to get back to putting a ton of effort into my listening- especially with the phone, in noisy environments and without any combined lipreading. I really need to enlist Jeff and my mom to start reading to me again, and I need to turn off the captions on the TV for short bursts for a challenge and do more books on CD amd and try to call someone on the phone everyday. Just as importantly, though, I need to give myself a break and realize that I may still get frustrated or depressed sometimes, because I am not going to hear every single thing the way that I might want to hear it. The times that I do feel frustrated, I can't then spend more energy getting mad at myself for being ungrateful! So, my frustrations, let's accept that you are there, and do the best I can to work with or around you.