Making Progress

We are approaching Rachel's 2 month post activation date. She was activated January 6th, and March 3rd will be 8 weeks. She has another mapping on that day. She attends weekly speech therapy, and each week we can see a measurable improvement in her discrimination of sounds. She is getting very good at understanding the cadence of speech. How many beats on the drum, how many sylabels in the word, etc... And she is beginning to recognise high pitch vs low pitch sounds.

It can be frustrating in the day to day activities because progress is slow. But she is making progress and that is all that counts. Seeing measurable gains is very encouraging. We are about one mile into the marathon.

Sunset

There was a beautiful sunset last night. I though I'd share.

Lower Array Not Working

Rachel had her fourth mapping today. We have been having trouble getting a good map for her lower electrode array (she has a split array). Today tests confirmed that she is not getting any hearing from the 3 electrodes on her lower array, and if the volume is turned up, all it stimulates is her facial nerve. So that array was turned off, and she is left with just the 8 electrodes on her upper array.

This is not the best news, but not the worst news either. The 8 electrodes on the upper array have been double mapped, so they do extra work. The levels have been increased also, so hopefully she will get more useful hearing from that side.

Up to now, she still is only hearing bells and tones, but she is starting to be able to distinguish between a closed set of sounds. We will continue to work with her to help her start understanding the sounds she is hearing from her right side.

She has been amazingly tolerant of everything, and has not gotten frustrated at all. I'm not sure I could be that patient or good natured.