Happy belated Thanksgiving! The trees have burst alive
into a thousand different shades of green, red and yellow and these colours
have never ceased to amaze and inspire me. I’m grateful I can see these
colours. Thanks to my friends and colleagues at CNIB as well as our clients, I
hope I never take my sight for granted. It’s a pleasure to try to describe our
surroundings to my friends with vision loss, I love taking on the role of a
walking, talking, coffee loving, audio description tool. I’ve had a busy few
weeks and have been unable to put hands to keyboard regarding my experience
with the Phonak Solana 312 Bi-CROS but
am back and will try to retrace my steps.
I’m Single Sided Deaf (SSD) in my right ear and have
moderate hearing loss in my left. I want to go back to the moment Jessie fitted
me with the custom hearing aid and how it felt.
For the past seven years I’d been lip-reading,
trying to sit in just the right spot in meetings to hear and my ability to
communicate was hampered, but I could manage all right. I had no idea how much
better things could be.
I sat in the chair, Jessie took me through the technicalities
and put
the hearing aids in. To say that
the world exploded into a burst of audio colour like the autumn leaves change
in October might be a little dramatic, but the colour of sound immediately became
more vivid and rich and beautiful.
She sat beside me on my deaf side and asked, “How does it
feel”? I replied that I could hear her perfectly and asked if she could she whisper
something as softly as she might ever whisper. She looked over at my coffee cup
and gently whispered….. “Starbucks.” I was overwhelmed, it was crystal clear.
We went through some questions on sound I would have to
answer on two subsequent fine tuning appointments and a few more
technicalities. Jessie told me she had never seen anyone so enthusiastic and
said that many people were hesitant to take the plunge toward wearing a hearing
aid. Technology has come so far and you can barely see them now, I wish
everyone who needed adaptive technology of any kind could get it. Anyway, I was
blown away and the coffee helped. Real world testing is next! Please stay
tuned.
