It's Thursday, June 21, 2012, and Allison and I are in the Audiologists’ waiting room at the Austin Ear
Clinic. We're waiting. We’re early because Allison thought the appointment was
at 8:30 instead of 9. When we realized we had some time to kill, we went to Starbucks,
but now I’m not sure if coffee is a good idea.
Amy opens the door and smiles
and greets us and we follow her back to the room. She introduces us to a
graduate student who’s going to be helping her and we all find our places: the
grad student in front of the computer; Amy sitting right next to her, so she
can give her instructions and watch the computer screen; Allison in a chair
that’s pulled up against the desk and turned so she’s facing them. I’m on the
other side of the room frantically pulling out cables and wireless mics and the
two cameras. I’m opening the two tripods and I don’t understand how anyone can
do this quickly or without looking like a klutz. Allison and Amy’s conversation
naturally falls into the subject of the implant and at one point I say, Wait!
Wait! I want to get everything on video! They politely acquiesce, or try to. In
less than a minute they’re back to talking about the implant but I don’t say
anything because how could they talk about anything else?
I hand them both tiny mics to
clip on their shirts.They’re both familiar with how the wireless system works
by now and once they’re ready, I’m ready. They test their mics, I listen with
the headphones on, we’re good to go.
 |
| Twenty-two different electrodes and their individual stimulation levels. The different colours represent levels at different times (see key). This MAP is not Allison's. This is just an image I pulled off the internet to give you an idea of how the graph looks. |
The first thing Amy does is plug
a thin cable into a mini-jack on Allison’s earpiece, connecting Allison’s
processor to Amy’s computer. A
blank graph appears on the computer screen.
Amy turns to look at Allison. “We
are going to start counting some beeps, so that way we can program your
implant. We are going to try different pitches of sound and you may feel some
of them before you hear them. The goal is to set the programming where it’s not
too loud, not too soft, and you’re hearing voices okay. I’ve already tested the
internal processor, the part under your skin, and everything’s fine with it. Ready
for the beeps?
“Yes.” Allison has a big grin
on her face.
“I want you to listen for a low
beep.” Amy turns back to the screen then back to Allison, waits.
“Nothing?” she asks.
Allison shakes her head.
Amy looks at the screen and
then back to Allison. Nothing? Allison thinks then says she can’t tell.
“I’m going to point to my ear
when it’s supposed to start,” Amy says, reaching up and touching her left ear.
“Okay.”
“Ready?” Amy asks and touches
her ear.
Most of the time Amy is looking
at the computer screen, telling the graduate student what she wants her to do
and then watching to make sure she does it. I assume she is choosing the pitch,
adjusting the volume (level of stimulation), and setting the number of beeps.
She turns to look at Allison again and raises her
eyebrows. Nothing? Allison shakes her head no.
These are tense moments. Is she
going to hear something? Anything? Of course she is, I tell myself, just as
I’ve told myself over and over again these last few months. So I wait. I’m waiting
for Allison to say Yes, I heard that!
Amy reaches up and touches her ear, looks at Allison. Allison nods.
“I think I heard that,” Allison says.
“Beep beep?”
“How many?” Amy asks, signing
the question at the same time.
“Two,” Allison says.
“Good.”
And that’s it – no fanfare or
fireworks or clapping – but I take a sigh of relief. It’s working – she hears
something.
The process continues like this
for half an hour, with Allison nodding more and more often, guessing the correct
number of beeps as Amy moves from electrode to electrode, increasing the pitch.
Amy is setting the stimulation range – the minimum volume, under which she
can’t detect a noise, to the maximum volume, above which the noise becomes
painful. The differences in louder sounds are much harder to distinguish, Amy
tells us, so she is just focusing on softer sounds today.
In about 25 minutes we are
done, and Misha and Pete and the kids are still not here. Amy suggests starting
over from the beginning with the first electrode, and explains that often by
the time a patient has gone through all the electrodes once, she can go back to
the first one and suddenly the patient can hear the beeps at a much lower volume.
“This is because,” Amy explains, “the patient knows what to listen for.” This
is just another way of saying that in the twenty-five minutes Allison’s brain
has been receiving this new information, it has already learned to process it
and make connections.
And sure enough, once Amy starts
back with the first electrode, Allison is able to hear much softer sounds.
That’s crazy! Think about it: Allison can actually hear sounds that just twenty
minutes previous she could not.
Amy unplugs Allison from the
computer then asks if we want to wait until our parents get there before she
turns on the implant. (When Allison was plugged into the computer, her implant
bypassed the microphone. So technically, her implant hasn’t been turned on to
the outside world.) We say yes, we want them here when it’s first turned on.
To be continued . . ..
