The past week was busy with significant task lists for both home and work things I need to wrap before spending 3-7 days in the hospital, 3 weeks of very low activity, and 4-6 weeks away from work. I’m going to catch up on where things are for surgery planning.

Cochlear implants are really cool. The inserted device is a small device they put inside my skull with a tiny bundle of wires that connect it to the cochlear nerve. There is an external audio processor (external is nice because it allows upgrades or replacements) that feeds a signal to the implant so I can hear.

There’s an interesting Catch-22 here, because although the hearing in my right ear is awful (20-28% word recognition at 40 dB volume when 100% at 10 dB is normal) it’s likely not bad enough to qualify for a cochlear implant. The surgery is “guaranteed” (worst guarantee ever!) to make me totally deaf in the right ear, which might be enough for insurance to approve a cochlear implant. The catch though is that since I’ll be on the tables with my skull open when that happens, it’s not really the best time to do a cochlear implant evaluation and insurance approval.

In the hopes that we can get an insurance approval, I went in for a cochlear implant evaluation on Tuesday, November 28. It was fun – way more fun than the audiogram tests listening to incomprehensible talking that just made me uncomfortable about how bad my right ear is. To do the test, they loaned me a pair of CROS hearing aids that were approximately calibrated to my audiogram. We did one test with me facing a speaker emitting mumbled voice-like noises and a quiet voice at various frequencies saying a sentence. My job was to repeat the sentences back I scored about 90%. Second test was the same except a speaker to my left was playing the noise and a speaker to my right (bad ear) saying the sentence. I scored about 90%. I would not qualify for a cochlear implant if I was covered by Medicare.

The really nice thing about the test that made me feel better about the future is that OMG I can hear really well with the CROS hearing aids. CROS hearing aids are designed to help people with single sided deafness. They use a microphone in the hearing aid on the deaf side to capture sound, transmit it to the hearing side, and also adjust for typical high frequency hearing loss (which is why they calibrated them with my audiogram). These days, when I am in a noisy room (say, out at a restaurant with friends or family) I can’t hear over half of what is said. So, this test was really nice because it has given me some confidence that we can improve things with or without the implant. This is good, since we still don’t have approval for the implant.

Next we looked at cochlear implant options. I have two choices: a unit by Advanced Bionics and a unit be Cochlear. Both would also have a hearing aid in my left ear, apps to configure the device, and the Bluetooth so I can use for listening to phone, computer, and anything else with Bluetooth. The Advanced Bionics unit has a cool accessory that is a remote adaptive microphone for those noisy situations. Place the mic on the table at that noisy restaurant and it will focus on nearby person speaking. The Cochlear model comes with two audio processors, and has an option for one that just magnetically sticks to my hear with no over the ear piece. The deciding factor really came down to MRI resilience. Since I am expecting to have annual (or maybe more) head MRIs that’s very important to me. The AB unit is good for 20 MRIs. The Cochlear is good for 100. So if I get when we are going for the Cochlear brand. In black, of course.