Off to Therapy

Tate had his first therapy appointment this morning, up at Western Washington University.  They have a fabulous hearing and speech program.  It's great to have such easy access to them.  We don't feel at all like we're "settling" to avoid the drive to Seattle.  Oh no.  We've got awesome people working with us :D

Didn't take any pictures and I don't have anything dramatic to report.  But it's good :D  I mean, he's only had the processor one day. 

With the implant only, (meaning the therapist was covering her face with a screen), he was able to discriminate some ling sounds from others, but the ee is really tricky.  They also had him trying to distinguish word pairs with same or different numbers of syllables, and he did pretty well at that.  Then one syllable words with same or different vowel sounds.  Oh my, those vowel sounds are tricky!

With the implant only, he really can't identify any words yet.  Some sounds he could get, though.  I can't remember any of the actual words, but sometimes he'd guess a word with the same initial consonant.  When you add in speech reading (meaning he's scrutinizing the speaker's mouth and face) he's able to get quite a bit.  Not sure how much the CI is playing into that, or if it's his excellent interpretative skills.

Of course, he's already maxed out the volume on Program 3, and the signal he's getting from the implant is pretty faint, so we're looking forward to new programs tomorrow.

His homework is
*  Spend as much time as he can using the implant alone, along with speech reading, to shift his brain over from focusing on the HA to focus on the CI signal. 
*  Play a game like UNO (limited set of colors, numbers, and words) and announce each card before playing it, so he can use just the implant and speech reading to guess the cards.
*  Listen to books on tape (okay, modern world... CD's) and listen/read with just the implant.
*  Of course, we can all talk and read to him any time :D

Basically, the more time he can spend with just the implant, the faster he'll adapt to it.

So, onward and upward :D