history repeats

I woke up this morning and put on my implant to find it isn't working. Battery changes haven't helped it, and there's not a lot I can do in the way of diagnostics or troubleshooting on my own. Scary thing is that it seemed fine through all of yesterday. No funny noises, no added difficulty hearing people.

If it were partially working I wouldn't be quite this freaked out. If it had been flaky, I'd be fine. But nothing at all out of the blue is scary as hell. It's like history repeating itself; I feel exactly the way I did the morning my natural hearing disappeared for good. Chances are this is fixable, but at what cost? If it's a simple problem I might be able to use a spare implant while they fiddle with the wiring or whatever, but if the external part has gone bust it'll cost thousands to replace. If the external part is fine and it's the internal doover that's gone shonky, well, that'll mean an operation. I'm sure it's just the wiring, but when you wake up to silence like this it's hard not to contemplate the worst.

What if this is my fault? I haven't maintained the anti-moisture stuff as closely as I should.

This is the first time anything has gone even slightly awry with the implant. Not a bad record for three and a half years. Just out of warranty, of course. I hadn't expected it to bring up so much of the panic and fear I remember from back then, and I don't know what to do to calm myself.

I guess I'll wait to see what Australian Hearing have to say.

implant update

I have an appointment at the Cochlear clinic tomorrow morning, the earliest we could get. In the hunt for documentation I found a little doodad that tells me if the coil on the external piece of the implant is sending out the radio signal which powers the internal bit while feeding it information about sound. I'd completely forgotten I had it - there haven't been any other problems in the last 3.5 years, after all. The Doodad of Wonderment seems to think the fault is in the external part, so that's a plus. Something about the idea of people cutting open my skull again makes me more than happy to fork out money instead.

Today has been a weird echo of times gone past. Matt took the day off work, which has been great in terms of making me feel safer around the house, and bad because it highlights just how isolated I am without the implant, just how dependent I have to be. He doesn't fingerspell fluently - we've had no need for it prior to now - so we've been communicating via email and IM. There've been charades and 'yes or no' type communications when we're away from the computers. At least we haven't resorted to 'Animal, Mineral, Vegetable' yet; 'spose that'll be a dinnertime activity.

Two of my favourite Wednesday night TV shows are out - Spicks and Specks is too musical, and At The Movies has really horrible captions these days. Not as bad as the ones on The 7:30 Report the other night where they called a female politican a 'laddie' and said she was going to to 'gross the floor', but still.

But there are some small bonuses. Firstly, this will add weight to my application for a cross-trained hound to do both guide and hearing dog foo. Secondly, I've found that our creaky landing - which I'm constantly cursing - is actually an advantage if I'm in the study. There's no way for me to look out the door and see if Matt's upstairs from where my desk is, but I can feel the floor creaking if he's moving around up here.