"Relax Your Ears"

A colleague sent me this website: relax-your-ears.com because the musician, Joel Styzens graduated from her alma mater, Miliken University. Styzens is a very talented musician who suffers from tinnitus and hyperacusis. Instead of ending his music career, he turned it into a new music career with an award winning album. He has also formed a tinnitus support group in the Chicago area. This article in Chicago Tribune shows how he deals with his tinnitus and hyperacusis. These are serious conditions that affect millions of people and usually has no cure. Read on!

Letter to the Dept of Justice - Movie Captioning

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is proposing a regulation to require movie theater owners and operators to having movie captioning and video description available for 50% of movies shown within 5 years. Great! How great is it that the DOJ and technology is finally in a position to allow equal access for the deaf/HoH people and blind/low vision people?? I mean, it's about time and there are many other things they need to help enforce (like captioning for internet videos and shows). But they are making progress on this also! Several organizations such as the Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA) and others are encouraging hearing care professionals and people with hearing loss to write comments to the DOJ regarding movie captioning. So...I decided to contribute. The DOJ is proposing (in a few words) to require movie theater owners and operators to have 50% of movie showings ready for captioning and video description within 5 years. HLAA stand on this issue to have 100% of movie showings available for movie captionings and video descriptions. That way, people who need them can see the movie of interest at any time they choose and therefore equal access.

This is all great and having the ability to view even 25% of movies would be great but I have a different concern: the type of captioning they will require. In the St. Louis area, AMC theaters have been good about making some movies available with captioning. However, most theaters are only equipped to show closed captioning. Also, it is usually a kind of closed captioning called "rear window captioning." If you have not experienced this, it is not an enjoyable way to view a movie. You have to ask for a bulky device from the front desk and then you have to position it in a cup holder and then make sure you sit in a specific area of the theater where the captions can appear onto the screen of the device. And then also position it somewhere in front of you where you can see both the captions and the movie. Sigh...it's kind of difficult, isn't it? That is, if it works at all. Movies that are open captioned (which have the words playing right on the screen) are much more enjoyable and effective. I wrote to the DOJ that open captioning would be more cost-effective because many more deaf and hard of hearing people would go to the movies. So what if non-deaf/hard of hearing people don't want to see the captions. They might be glad they were there so they could catch what someone said if they missed it!

9 month post CI surgery

Today I went for my 9 month CI appt for the research study. It's hard to believe it's been 9 months! A lot has definitely happened since then and also since I last wrote in September...I'm a terrible blogger! Since September though, I have been adapting to my new drive, new life back in St. Louis and spending time with friends and family. Oh and Brian and I got engaged on Dec 23rd! It's a been an eventful and exciting 2010. I may have struggled with adapting to my CI but I think it's finally stabilizing and I miss it when I don't have it on!

Early December, I had my processor remapped with new settings and new programs. Since then I have noticed that I have been wearing my CI processor more consistently and am more comfortable with sounds. It's probably a combination of getting used to the perception of hearing through it and also the new levels. When I had my CI remapped in December, my audiologist gave me 4 new programs. One with no input processing, one with ADRO, one call Focus (BEAM, ADRO, and ASC), and one with ZOOM. The Zoom feature was new to me. Previously, this feature was only available via the remote. Of course, I never used it because I hardly ever carried the remote with me. Zoom is supposed to find the source of speech in a noisy environment and direct the microphone to hone in on it. Before that, I had been using mostly the program with Beam, ASC, and ADRO, which I liked best because I could tell it reduced static noise significantly and also made soft sounds sharper thanks to ADRO.

So now for the past month and half, I have been using mostly the Zoom program. It seems to work better when I'm in the car and listening to the radio. Since I started working, I've been listening to KMOX on my drive to work because they usually speak more clearly and I know what time certain broadcasts will be going on. I can't get everything, but I like listening for the weather and traffic report :) When I am in a restaurant, I seem to do well with the Zoom program but I also like the Focus program too. They sound different but it is difficult to tell what the difference is. I think the Focus program makes softer sounds louder which helps.

So back to it being 9 months! During the speech perception tests today, we did a lot of listening to words and sentences (in quiet and in noise) with my CI side only, my HA side only, and both CI/HA. With only my CI, I was able to get about 5 words right on the word test and some phonemes. But out of a 100 words, that's still not much. However, words sounded more different from each other than before. I also seemed to do better repeating sentences in noise when I had both CI/HA on compared to my HA only. My audiologist was concerned that I was not detecting the very high frequencies (thresholds were in 40s) so she increased the levels and gain for those today. I could not tell a big difference but we'll see when I'm partaking in meaningful conversations.

I guess I should also mention that I finally got my rechargeable battery system! And my microphone covers! After contacting several people, they finally came. The rechargeable batteries are awesome. They usually last about a day and half and I still carry my disposable battery pack just in case.

And last but definitely not least, I do have a new years resolution for 2011: Spend more time practicing with my CI only! I'll let you know how that goes :)