CI Activation

...And the long wait was over and it was the date of CI activation in June 2006. Since I missed most of the important events so far I wanted to be present when Anasooya's CI goes live.
The doctors don't have much of a role to play now and the audiologists take over the activation and mapping, or in other words fine-tuning the device. After waiting for almost an hour we were asked to bring her in. It was her usual time for taking a nap. We were trying to keep her awake and wanted her to be in a happy mood. First the technicians didn't let all of us in the family to get in thinking that it might distract Anasooya and hence making it difficult to judge the responsiveness to properly map the device. But when I said that I wanted to have this videographed they let me in. After all, this was the event that we were all waiting for and possibly the second time that we were going to be happy when we hear her cry!!!
So Anasooya, her parents and me along with the technicians in the room and we were all set for the switch-on.

Some initial checks as usual and then the mapping started. It was amazing to see her first response. She was playing with some toys and suddenly turned her head to the side to see where the sound(!) came from. I think she was surprised by this. So far she got used only to sight and touch. Wow! a new sense got added just now... How can I ever describe that feeling!
The next thing they did was to increase the intensity (not quite sure about the exact technical terminology that they might be using) of the sound and this time she cried.
She wouldn't have got any clue why all the people around her are jumping out of joy when she is crying. Luckily I caught this in video and maybe she can forgive us later!

It is still not clear to me how the sense of hearing is like with a Cochlear Implant. I have seen many websites/blogs by older people who've got the implant much later in their life. But they don't seem to completely describe how the exact feeling is like. It could be possibly because the results vary from individual to individual. I have read somewhere that when you first hear sound through a CI it is a mechanical noise. Possibly yes, as our brain is so used to filter out the relevant noises from a chaotic acoustic world. Our brain is so much sophisticated to listen to only those sounds that match the context and this has happened over the years. May be a new born hears the same way as a newly implanted kid, perhaps a little more clear. It is the training and constant refinement in filtering the sounds that makes a perfect sense of hearing, I believe. At times I keep one of my ears completely closed and try to listen to sounds using the other ear thinking that I may get a feeling of how a single cochlear implant would possibly be. Yes, there is a lot of echo in this case and it is very difficult for us to hear that way. I am not sure if this experiment is ever comparable to a single cochlear implant and that a bilateral implant may be compared to normal hearing using both ears that reduces the noise level.

The next few weeks after the activation were very interesting. Initially there was not much of a difference that we could see. The doctors infact had told us that it might take as many as 6 months to see any positive results. There were a couple of more mapping sessions to follow.
The first mapping session that happened after a week or two of the activation was not very accurate as it turned out. The next one however improved the results. By then, she responded quite well to the sounds and one could clearly see her brain learning to listen to sounds. Typically it used to take a second or two for her to turn to the side where the sound came from. A larger turn-around time! But the next few weeks saw a constant improvement in hearing. She used to look upward when we asked her where a crow is, or she used to point to our pet dog (Ditto) when we asked where he is and so on. She also learnt to wave her hands when we said 'tata' without giving her any indication with our hands. Another important development was that she started making loud noises mostly gibberish and used to blabber continuously, may be as an attempt to reproduce the sounds as she hears. At this stage her grandparents thought she at times 'says' words meaning 'grandpa' and 'grandma' in Malayalam, our mother tongue though it was not quite clear. However, we couldn't accept it as a success unless she says something that is clear and meaningful and the wait continued along with the training that we started months before the surgery.



PS: I will upload the video and publish it here as soon as I compress it to manageable size.