4 Month Update

Tomorrow it will be 4 months since Rachel's right implant was activated. She is making slow steady progress. This morning at speech therapy, she got about 60% on all the computer games she "plays", except for one where she got 100%. The program is called Earobics. It is fantastic. There are about 4 "games" she plays with only her new right implant in use. There is an environmental sound game where she has 9 pictures to choose from when an environmental sound is played. Another plays two vowel sounds and she has to choose if they are the same or different from each other. A third game says a two syllable word, one syllable at a time. She has three pictures to choose from. This has been the hardest for her, and she usually has only gotten two out of 10. The one she is best at is the cadence game. It playes one, two, three, four or five sounds, and she has to decide how many sounds she heard. She generally has gotten either 9 ro 10 our of 10 on this one for a while now.

On the other games, she got 6 right today. 60%, even on the hard one where she has to figure out an actual word. This is still a ways from understanding speech in an open set, but it is good measurable progress. She is hearing from that ear, and her brain is making steady progress at making sense of the sounds coming in.

Another improvement is her distance hearing. Over the weekend, I was on the lower level of a two story room with an open living room. She was on the second story balcony in a sitting area. I called up to her, and she answered, even though she could not see me. Before her second implant, this would have been nearly impossible. I'm not sure that she even notices the improvement in her ability to understand sound, but improving she is! I'm thrilled.