Beyond Hearing Loss: My First Hook-up

Today I cannot remember much of that first hook-up except that it was a bad and disappointing experience.

My hook-up was on the 29th of November. My sister Hester accompanied me and we took the usual cakes etc. to celebrate the occasion but my heart was not really in it! All I wanted was to start hearing again and I had high hopes that I would return home and hear Hennie once again. The moment of hook-up was one of the most disappointing experiences of my whole life!! All white noise!! I just put on a show for everyone present. Smiling, trying to laugh and pretending that I was pleased with what was supposed to be my "new" hearing! I even kept up the pretence after getting home since I was so scared that Hennie would say: "I told you it was not going to work!!" Instead he just said: "You expected too much! You must be patient, it will get better!! Now open your presents!!"

The next was discovering that the processor was faulty. In hindsight this was a blessing in disguise because my processor was returned to cochlear and I was fitted with a Sprint body processor and all sounded more like speech. This made it possible for me to hear Hennie’s last words, to follow word for word during his funeral a week later and to have quite a wonderful CI moment hearing the birds the morning after his death... I am not going to repeat those much told stories here but you can read about them again on my home page if you want to.

For the rest the hook-up photos will tell the story. In those days I was not so obsessed with photos but fortunately I had quite a few taken and today they are part of the memories and this life-changing experience.

My wonderful sister was at my side once again for hook-up! She travelled all the way from their small town Coligny – more than a 2 hour drive to be with me. See how good we looked a mere ten years ago LOL

Esti did the hook-up as shown by the following photos:

Esti explaining what its all about and showing me how to use the tiny switches etc.

My first try at putting on my new “ear” As you can see I was not yet comfortable with doing this LOL Today I don’t even think of it and just use one hand to plonk them onto my ear(s) and off I go.

My absolute astonishment at the moment of hook-up! It seems as if Esti and the other audiologist (I cannot remember her name and she was not one of the team but attended out of curios ity) was really thinking that it was a wonderful experience for me NOT!!

More (awful) new sounds and me trying to explain to Esti what I heard. You can see she is a bit more concerned than in the previous photo LOL Elna looking on.