Today was my first day back on campus. Sex & Gender class went fine in the morning, I am caught up with everything (I think). Tomorrow we’ll find out how much I fell behind in my other classes, and whether I can catch up quickly or what. I know I fell behind in my linguistics reading…I don’t think I even cracked that book while we were gone! I have to do some history reading tonight for sure.

Also today I had my brain scan at the audiology center. They found out that the hearing loss does not lie between the cochlea and the brain, so it’s somewhere between the eardrum and the cochlea. They don’t know why, though, and won’t speculate - they said I’d need to see an ENT doc for that. They explained why my mild hearing loss is a problem - apparently a high frequency loss takes away sounds like s, sh, and f. As we all know from Wheel of Fortune, s is a very common letter (RSTLNE anyone?) and so by missing certain sounds, I’m not able to fully understand. It’s not that I can’t hear when someone is speaking, I know they are speaking, but missing out on certain sounds means I don’t get the full information.

For home situations, I have to train my family to get my attention before they start talking to me, not call to me from another room, etc. This will allow me to use lipreading just a little bit so I can fill in the gaps, and also it makes sure my attention is focused on my ears. The reason I have trouble is because I often miss the first half of a sentence and then I miss some information from the rest of it and I end up clueless. So attention-getting is going to be important at home. For work, the audiology department is going to order a special in-line amplifier so I can try it for 30 days and see if that helps me. If it does, then I get to buy it for myself - they’ll tell me how much it costs. If it doesn’t help, uh…I dunno!

The audiologist is going to send my audiogram and the certification letter to the admissions department so I can get converted over to regular student status.