Today..

...quite a bit of driving.

I couldn't make my meeting last month because of just having the cochlear mapping changed drastically.

It is a long trip, nearly a hundred miles, with some other stuff I do. And I had lost my confidence driving. I have been using my iPhone sat nav thingy for even short journeys.

But this morning, I don't know what happened, but I just got in the car and drove without using my phone map for directions. I suddenly realised I had my confidence back. This was good. I am pleased.

I had a breakfast somewhere else before I went there. But as I went in and people started talking, the audiologist's words that I would not be able to hear with the implant in group and noisy situations came back and suddenly my stomach sunk to below floor level.

No, I thought, you (audiologist) are not defining me and my world. It took me a moment or two of my brain being stunned to just hearing distorted noise before I pulled myself together. I changed settings using my remote to try get rid of the distortion, then I put on the mini mic and tried streaming the voices through that into my processor. It gave a more rounded sound to the voices. I was back in control.

Between the incoming sound and my lipreading I could cope. But I found that if I had the processor on scan I could make more sense of conversations in my right, aided with lip reading. However to make more sense of conversations on my left, I had to alter the setting to no scan.

So between my eyes picking up new speakers, and using the remote and mini mic, to adjust from where the voice came from, I was able to make a confident contribution to the conversations.

We all need encouragement to make the best of whatever it is we have. And we can do it.

Just as an aside, this morning I watched a pregnant mother taking her small son to school and he was delightedly planting kisses on her big belly and it looked like he was whispering words to his unborn sibling. He was smiling. And I smiled too as I drove past.