Another Cochlear Implant WOW Moment: Are you listening?

Let me describe what happened, then we can discuss it.  Here's the situation:

I was in the living room, sitting at my desk facing the wall, working at my computer, with my back towards the room.  My husband was also in the living room, 15 feet away (I just measured it), talking with my two cousins. I thought I was engrossed in my reading and writing at the computer, yet my husband asked me a question - as if I had been a part of their conversation all along - and I turned around and answered him!  Without a moment's hesitation or skipping a beat!  Way to go, brain!

I was so shocked at doing this - and also because my cousins didn't realize anything extraordinary had just happened - that I had to inform them of the amazing hearing trick they had just witnessed - unannounced and unrehearsed - and never before performed, ever!

Now comes the commentary.  How did my husband know:
a) that I was even listening to the conversation from 15 feet away with my back turned when I didn't even know I was doing that
b) that I could follow this conversation from 15 feet away with my back turned
c) that I could answer his question without asking for a repeat or risk being embarrassed
d) that I could do all of the above when I had never done this before.

The short answer is that my bilateral hearing is still getting "better," but it's not only impacting my behavior, it's also impacting the behavior of those around me.  My husband already knows that I will turn to my name if he calls me.  We've been doing that for three years now (I started turning to his voice three months after going bilateral), so although we still don't take that for granted, it's become routine and reliable that I will turn if he calls.  It's not a leap of imagination to figure out that if I can do that, I am probably attuned to more than just my name by now - casually taking in conversations in range without consciously trying to.  And so it was!

It is also another example of what I consider one of the key sentences in my book, Listening Closely: A Journey to Bilateral Hearing:
"People treat you differently when they know you can hear them."

Cochlear Implant Bilateral WOW moment

The strangest thing happened today - this CI old-timer, who has been using a CI for 14 years, and has been bilateral for three years, just had another WOW bilateral realization today. I do believe that my bilateral hearing continues to get "better"! 

No, I wasn't in a testing booth, I was at an antique show - haven't been to one in many, many months. This one was indoors in a cavernous event space - with additional exhibitors outside.  It was after browsing the entire show that I realized that a lot of dealers were talking to me today - and I wasn't even looking at them, but I never asked for a repeat, and for most of them, I answered without even looking back at them.  I didn't think it was necessary to look at their faces to continue conversing with them? 

This is definitely a case of my bilateral hearing continuing to get "better" - and me getting more used to hearing casually - being able to hear people from all directions and wider distances.  And the more that happens, the more casual my reaction - just talking back to them without consciously thinking "WOW."  In fact, it wasn't until AFTER doing this for about two hours that I realized that my behavior had changed.  Oh, my!

Reality check: this doesn't happen all the time, and much depends on acoustics, background noise, voices, etc. - but the reality is that this NEVER happened to me as consistently as it did today - not in decades or miles of antique browsing.

Arlene

Cochlear Implant WOW moments

I had a WOW moment yesterday - and one would think these don't happen after 14 years with a cochlear implant (CI) - and three years of bilateral CI use.  A WOW moment is the realization that you could do something or hear something you never would have been able to do without the miracle of your cochlear implants.  Here's the story:

My husband bid on and won tickets (at a charity silent auction) to a dinner/magic show held at a posh location in Manhattan. It was the kind where they do magic tricks at your dinner table, and then a magic show with a lot of interaction with the audience. I was a little leery - I never like to put myself in a position of potentially not hearing - and this had no assistive listening devices or captioning - so I knew I'd be flying without a net.

When the magician did his magic at our table, I interacted with no repeats - did all the "pick this" "tell me that" instructions and answers instantly.  WOW!  And then the magic show itself - in this small room environment, everyone was in the hot seat - I got called on to "knock on the wall" and "do this, do that" - from 20 feet out.  I got it all - and even the jokes, and laughed along!  They never suspected I was deaf.  WOW!

There was one coin trick the magician did at our table, where I held two coins in my closed fist - and he magically "dropped" a third one into my closed hand - and I HEARD the "clink," and when I opened my hand, I had three coins!

I told my husband immediately (and excitedly) that I heard the "clink."  Turns out that he wasn't going to mention it to me because if I hadn't heard it, he didn't want me to be upset (I think that's why we're married 41 years).  But nope - I heard it - and you better believe that I wasn't expecting to!  So add another WOW there.

This was bilateral WOW - and it's "advanced WOW" - because I put myself in this position - it didn't just happen to me. The confidence to try to do something I never would have done before. That's the WOW part - and my husband, who often knows better how I'm hearing than I do, thought I could. And he was right.