Life Before Cancer, Part 3

I walked out the door of the office and it felt like I was in another world. From the sounds of the door clicking shut to the swoosh swoosh of my shoes as I walked down the carpeted hall and the ping of the elevator arriving. It was all so new to me. I had no idea what to make of it all.

The thing most people forget is that you take for granted the smallest sounds that for someone like me are completely new and foreign.

Getting off the elevator, I made my way to the outside world. Perhaps the biggest thing was the sounds of cars on the street. From engines racing and idling, to the sound of them passing by, tires making crackling sounds against the pavement. It was funny, I had to get used to listening for traffic instead of just watching for it.

Now, the thing with a CI is that it does require updating from time to time, 3, 6, and 12 months kind of thing. The CI needs to essentially be fine tuned for your personal situation and that can only be done over time with feedback from the user.

Aside from environmental sounds, I think for me, one of the best things was being able to hear music. Again, you dont really realize how beautiful something like that can be until your hearing it for the first time. I will spend some more time on that later.

As you can imagine, another highlight was being able to hear my mom and dad's voice. It was really something special to hear them and to hear emotion in their voices. Its a special moment that I think I will always remember for as long as live. The fun part was just moving around the house, testing how far away I could go before I stopped hearing them and then spending time testing my ability to make out words that they were speaking and stuff like that.

I think one of the most fun things was listening to things being cooked in the kitchen. The sound of water being run into a pot, things boiling, other things sizzling, microwave running, all that stuff that most people think nothing of, was very interesting to me. honestly, when was the last time you stood in your kitchen and listened to bacon cook in a frying pan...listen to the popping and snapping and sizzling. I bet you haven't have you? Dont even get me started on my experiences with rice krispies LOL.

I could talk about this stuff forever and it would never be enough. I am going to keep posting on this kind of stuff until I run out of things like this to post on. From there we can go to music, movies, all kinds of stuff but most importantly, we can go to the sound of my own voice.

Perhaps in the next entry I should talk about more of the environmental sounds and then move to some other things like crowds, malls, stuff like that. I am like a kid in a candy store right now....so much I could talk about and I have no idea where to start.

Yeah, I think in the next entry I will talk more about environment stuff and then move on to my own voice and the challenges of learning to talk for the very first time.

LiveSTRONG!