Hearing the Television - 11/9/2007

I was talking with Nichole in the car last night (which in and of itself is a miracle, since conversations in a car were very difficult before her CI). I asked how school went. She indicated they had a substitute for Chemistry. They watched a movie and then had to take a quiz about the contents. I asked if she had the substitute put the FM beside the TV. "Well, no, because the TV is mounted hi up on the wall" (since it is a lab setting). Ok, well was the movie captioned? "No. There were no captions".

Nichole sits about 15 feet from the TV (I now know). Before her CI, she would not have been able to hear any of the movie. So I could feel my protective dad "turbine" starting to spin up at the thought of her being quizzed on a movie under such conditions, when Nichole's face brightened and she said "I understood most of what they were saying in the movie, and I think I did pretty well on the quiz"!

Having her be able to hear electronically produced speech has been one of the goals that I wasn't sure would be achieved (see my earlier post The straw that broke the camel's back). Her experience with her CI just keeps getting better !

Trick or Treat - 11/1/2007

Last night was Halloween. While Nichole was not going to go out trick-or-treating with the family, her Sister was able to convince her to join us. Nichole dressed up as a skier (she is on her high school ski team). We went through the neighborhood. At one house, the wife greeted the pack of kids at the door, while the husband was inside, about 15 feet from the front door, up a set of stairs. He called out Nichole's name, asking how "it" (the CI) was going. Amidst the noise of kids saying "thank you" for the the candy, and bags rustling, she heard him, looked up at him, and said "good" (which for my 10th grader, is verbose :-). He commented that it "must be going well" for her to be able to respond to him like that.