Life is Great!

I had a great weekend.  It’s unseasonably warm here (in the 80’s) and the weekend was sunny and also quite windy.  I was outside for around 8 hours each day.  Being outdoors poses a challenge for the hearing impaired, especially when it is windy.

Today our company helped host a 5K run and walk for one of our clients, our local school system.  It was a fantastic event and one that would have been so totally different for me a year ago.  I often compare experiences I have with how they may have been before having cochlear implants. It’s hard not to.  My life has truly been restored to a point I didn’t think possible.  I’m continually amazed at how true this is.

If this event had happened this time last year, I would have found things to do where I interacted with as few people as possible.  I might have offered to take pictures of the event, or even went out somewhere on the route to help direct traffic.  Not so today.

Today I stayed around the most hectic and noisy area of the event – registration.  I helped retrieve registration materials as people checked in.  I was right in the thick of everything…and it was fantastic! At one point I noticed that someone from one of the TV stations showed up.  The young lady walked over to an area by the fence and I went up to her to help direct her where to set up her camera and find the appropriate person to talk to.  I would have never though of approaching her this time last year.

The wind noise wasn’t really an issue for me, even though others (with normal hearing) were complaining about it.  I simply changed settings so I was picking up sound from the top of my processors instead of from the openings to my ears.

We had an incredible event emcee and sound system! I could hear every announcement very clearly.  In fact, I was answering questions from people around me when asked “what did he just say?”.

One other observation of comparison I’d like to make is that, as I’ve shared before, hearing with hearing aids was very tiring for me.  As my word recognition declined, my fatigue increased.  The more tired I was, the harder I had to work to hear and the worse my hearing was.

I’m worn out tonight after a busy weekend, and I’m sure that if I was still wearing hearing aids my hearing acuity would have suffered simply from being tired, let alone the wind and just being outdoors.

Life is great!