CI Regrets??

I talked to a close friend who is SSD because of an acoustic neuroma. He decided against a CI. Main reasons include that he’s active and athletic, going through the surgery and risks, having to relearn how to hear, and the strongest reason is that he’s learned how to live with SSD. F try on reading lips to using acoustics in big gatherings to listen. In my case, I have enough residual hearing left right now; while useless for speech recognition the question for me is that a CI cannot make things worse post implant. I’m not sure that is possible. I’ll be getting more information about the procedure and will share.

 

No, it is not worse post implant. Ultimately, you can decide not to wear the processor and you are right where you are now. Or, you can wear it and train, and learn to hear again out of a deaf ear. Pretty easy choice for me.

 

I don’t think so, but I’m also not an expert. Stuffing the electrodes into the cochlea is pretty invasive to that anatomy so I can’t imagine any residual hearing would remain. My opinion only. I was completely deaf in my implanted ear.

 

I’m a unilateral CI recipient and it does help with sound location. That definitely makes me feel safer when I’m out and about.

I don’t know that it helps with noisy group settings. My CI has a lot of echo and rattle in the sound which is actually tougher in noisy settings.

 

My OTO tells me that post operation my residual hearing will drop 20db. That’s typical, sometimes more but not less. The electrode foes into the cochlea and likely impacts the tiny hair cells enough to cause this. So again, it depends where you are at now. If your speech recognition percentage is below 20% then it will get worse. But it’s already bad in my case.