Nathan is ON

Nathan's cochlear implant was turned on yesterday. They started the mapping process, a process that will take about 1 1/2 months and he will need to be remapped annually. Mapping = programming all the electrical points in his implanted cochlear devise to the correct volume. The volume on his implant is very low right now. The remote for his implant has 4 different level programs in there right now. In the next few days we will turn him up to level 2 and so on. When he is hearing at full capacity he will be at level 10 (I think). His brain needs time to learn his new way of hearing and over stimulating him would be very negative for him. We are not getting huge reactions out of him yet but this is good and normal. I will post our "turn-on" video soon. It is on Preston's phone so I need to download it when he gets home.

After mapping we had an hour long meeting teaching us about his devise and all its accessories. Wow, there is a lot of stuff. It is going to take some time to get used to everything. He also received a few fun things from the company. My favorite is the elephant with cochlear implants.
We are so excited for Nathan to have this opportunity.

On Tuesday Nathan had his post surgery follow-up with his doctor. Since everything went so smoothly his doctor said he would allow Nathan to have his second implant at any time. Preston and I talked about when we would want to do the second implant and right now concluded that we would let Nathan make the choice. (Of course we are open to things changing and making the decision on our own if it is clearly better for him). We have given Nathan the ability to really learn to listen and speak. There are pros and cons to one or two implants. With an additional implant he would have better sound localization and a little better overall hearing, however if he takes out both his implants then he is pretty much completely deaf (swimming, sleeping, etc). If he does not get an additional implant he would keep the little hearing he has in his left ear allowing him to hear VERY LOAD (ambulance, fire truck, tea kettle whistling, smoke detector, etc) without his implants. So, that is where we are on implant 2 right now.

I promise to post some pictures and video soon.