Maybe it isn't so bad after all

While I'm not appreciating the loudness of bird chirping on program 2, the advantage of using that program is starting to outweigh the intial annoyances.  It is a mixed blessing, for I can turn up the volume and gain slightly better speech understanding, but the knowledge that the reduced midtone and bass pitches keeps it from being a superior program.

When people ask how I hear, it really is a difficult task.  One example I've been using is that the sound I hear now is similar to a pixelated picture.  You can see the picture, know what it is, but there are rough edges that detract from the overall quality.  After the third month improvements are not that noticiable. 

I've been giving it some thought about headphones.  Music comes through much fuller and pleasing while using headphones, and I suspect anything on TV would become easier to hear if I tried headphones.  I keep using captioning, since it relieves me from having to work to hear.  Not a good stragegy, since it slows down the progress on speech recognition.  Maybe this is because I'm between two camps of thought.  There's a ton of experts and other CI users that say that hearing comes by learning, by working on auditory training.  Then there's others that say "let the hearing come to you"  Because I live on the Big Island where there's little or no auditory training, and would have to sacrifice time and money to travel to Honolulu, I've defaulted into the "let the hearing come to you" camp.

I love my CI, it really means that makes it possible to communicate with "the impossible to lip-read people." of which there were many on the campus.  I still have to step out more boldly and use my hearing, but I get plenty of practice each day anyhow.  For those who never learned to lip-read, take heart because even without that there's plenty of sound information coming in that it will make sense, though you'll feel like a foriegner learning English again in some cases.  Each of us are different.  Without lip-reading, I would still understand plenty, but require repeats.  As of now, I seldom need repeats except on the phone.  This is because my CI has yet to be optimized for use on the phone.

It just works.