This was the fun appt! Seriously! (Abby loved playing with the little green aliens too! lol). But no, this appt was all about my choices for the gadgets. I call them gadgets, coz i'm a geek & I like calling them gadgets lol.
Obviously there is no need to worry about what colour things are going to be when they are implanted inside your head, so ignoring that part!
My processor, which is the thing that looks like a hearing aid, that goes over my ear - that comes in plain bland colours. I chose BROWN ... which seems boring, but it blends in with my hair which makes the 'coil cable' & 'coil magnet' (the part that attaches to the processor & magnetically attaches to the implant under my skin) - it makes that part fairly discreet. Its nice to be discreet a lot of the time ;)
But then there are fun times! With my processor, I am allowed 2 fun processor covers which make it all a bit funky & fun if I so choose to be a bit different one day lol. So I chose the options 'Pretty' & 'Zebra'. Pretty is purple mainly, so thats why I had to choose that one - purple being my favourite colour! Abby pointed to the 'Soccer' cover which was blue & had soccer balls all over it. Unfortunately, I wasn't as enthusiastic about that as she was, so I decided against taking her advice. Sorry babe!
My last colour option was for me Remote Assistant. Its basically another gadget lol. It allows me to adjust & manage things without having to touch the processor. It also shows little signs when things go wrong, which it isn't going to of course! But if something did happen, like the coil got damaged or the battery was going flat, then this remote assistant would tell me that! Pretty cool huh! So I don't need to do what I used to do when I was wearing hearing aids - wait until its completely dead battery & i'm wondering why I can't hear :P Oh & colour choice? It comes in White, but you can get a black or red case to protect it - so I went with the black one. Like I say, in most cases, I like things to be discreet & not obvious lol.
We also discussed when my 'Switch on' would happen. I mentioned that my Mum is currently on holidays & won't be available to get over here until the last week of August at the earliest. We discussed the fact that a 'switch on' wouldn't be like what most 'outsiders' assume it is like. A lot of media & all the videos on youtube are often misinforming people, or maybe they aren't but the 'outsiders' perhaps misinterpret what it is that is being 'heard'.
Most people assume that a 'switch on' means you have hearing. Yes, you have hearing (providing it works for you). But what you are hearing is not what a hearing person with no aids would be hearing. Its sounds, more than words.
So in the cases of those "son hears mummy talk for the first time" or "mother hears daughter say i love you" for the first time (I still bawl my eyes out with seeing them regardless lol). In most cases (not all cases), what the person is hearing is the "sound" rather than the words. I imagine it may give what their voice sounds like, obviously I can't say too much from experience coz I haven't got that far yet!
Some people have said at their switch on, that it sounds like a whole lot of beeping. Or maybe like a robotic sound. So instead of hearing "HELLO", all we hear is "beep beep" if that. If you do some research online with google or whatever, you may find different peoples experiences from having the Cochlear Implant done. I hope to add to that list eventually when my turn comes. I hope to not necessarily be blogging everyday, but I plan on having a note pad beside me so I can eventually put it up on my blog. I do feel that it has helped me reading other peoples blogs / experiences with the procedure. I have found that it is not always the most recent information though, so I don't know whether time changes that or not. Maybe it does.
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