On Being a Bad Blog Updater, And Other Adventures in Cybernetics

So my goal, at one point, was to update this once a week. This has not worked as well as I had hoped.

Partly this is due to what was mentioned in the last blog: progress is horribly slow, so there’s not much to report.

My wife can hear birds now. We were leaving REI and she was like “What’s the chirping sound?” It was birds. Chirping. So that was neat. But otherwise progress is slow. But it is progress, so I can’t complain.

This has not been helped by every other stressful thing that could happen in my life being like “Fresh cyborg? Man, that will make stuff extra stressful!” and then all happening at once. Because it turns out, trying to learn how to hear is kind of stressful, and part of the joy of marriage is sharing stress.

So, pending a future post about maintaining your mental stability with a cyborg spouse (and helping your cyborg spouse maintain her mental stability), I give you a few short bits about the cyborg experience.

Batteries

My wife currently only has a Neptune processor. This only uses 1 AA battery. It came with rechargable, and with a charger. The problem is that the charger only works with 2 batteries, and she doesn’t run out of even numbers in a day. She uses something like 2 1/2-3, which makes keeping even numbers of batteries charged kind of problematic. It has also led to her running out of batteries at extremely awkward times and having to switch.

Usually she installs new batteries right about the time I close a car door, or hit the garage door opener. Just in time for a nice, loud, obnoxious noise that apparently is not pleasant to the recently deaf.

Whether this will be better or not when she gets her new processor, I don’t know. We’ll find out.

Bedtime

The biggest problem with my wife’s cyborgness is that CI is somewhat tricky to deal with in bed. Most people get in bed, remove their implant, and go to sleep.

Sounds reasonable. Except that my wife and I have a long, long history of getting in bed and then ending up talking about ALL THE THINGS! To the point that at some point I took to rolling over after an hour or two so that we could actually get some sleep.

That kind of spontaneity vanishes when she has to unplug her ears. Of course, it’s been going away for a long time as her hearing slowly declined, and more and more conversations become “We should have this conversation when I can see you talk.” But it’s one more reminder of the artificiality of her hearing.

That’s what I have for now. If you have questions, comments, or things you would be interested to know, you should totally comment and let me know. I will probably right about it.