I make a point of replacing my hearing aid battery just before I travel; it's a pain to be at the airport or in a car and realize all of a sudden that you can't hear well anymore. It's one of the nice things, oddly enough, about the 12-hour lifetime of a CI battery - much easier to remember to change the battery regularly when it's something you have to do every morning. Anyway - you'd think that this habit of changing batteries before I travel would be a good reminder to put a spare package in my backpack. Unfortunately, it's not.

All of this ran through my head yesterday when my hearing aid went beep-beep-dead. It wasn't a disaster; I wasn't in a particularly social or noisy setting, and I was able to get to the store and buy batteries before I was in such a setting. But it did mean that I spent a few hours using just my implant, and I realized something: it sounded almost normal.

I know what you're thinking: how could you not notice that? How does that come as a surprise? But it was! Just a few weeks after my implant was activated, it faded into the background. It was a big help, certainly, and it was very obvious that I was wearing it when I became overloaded or wore it too long; but as long as I wore a hearing aid on the other (I'm sorry, contralateral) side, I really didn't notice the unnaturalness of it all that much. And yesterday, the CI by itself ... sounded fantastic. Like I was speaking to a human being, and not through a radio or inside a metal box. Very exciting! This is indeed the holy grail, to the point that I can definitely see going bilateral someday when my left ear joins my right ear in the big audiobooth in the sky. (Or possibly sooner, but the time and effort involved just isn't worth it right now, and probably - hopefully - won't be anytime soon.)

I do have one tweak I'd like to make. Things don't feel loud enough, although I can't turn the volume up without feeling the pain that comes from too much current. It also feels a bit flat (texture, not pitch) - though flat isn't the quite the word to use. I'm not really sure how to verbalize it, but I suspect it's a quality that most people with hearing aids will recognize. I suspect, based on 16 years of experience with my own aids, that I don't actually need more volume overall, just a bit of a boost in the low frequencies. This is one of those occasions it'd be convenient to be able to program my own equipment; it's not a big enough change or improvement that I'm willing to make an appointment (and deal with transportation, the wait, the co-pay, etc) with my audiologist. And I'm not totally sure that's it, so it'd be nice to try bumping the lows for a few days, then adjust other things if that doesn't turn out to be the case. But it's not a big problem, so I'm content to wait until my next scheduled reprogramming in a few months.

Edit: In the interests of honesty, I should point out that later that night, while I was feeling all excited about this, and had both my hearing aid and my CI on, I misheard "real GDP" as "real shitty pizza".