I had my first major mapping adjustment on August 10, 2026.
There were definitely some improvements. Things sounded a little clearer, and some of the muddiness I had been struggling with improved. But there was also a tradeoff I wasn’t expecting: the overall sound decreased too much.
My surroundings suddenly seemed much quieter. Environmental sounds that I had been starting to notice became harder to hear again, and even at 100% volume, there were situations where I simply wasn’t getting enough sound. The adjustments may have improved certain parts of what I was hearing, but they also made it more difficult to hear the world around me.
That has been frustrating, especially because one of my goals with my cochlear implant isn’t simply understanding speech in a quiet room. I want to hear everything. Voices, birds, music, announcements, background sounds—all of the little pieces that make up the world around me. So I called my audiologist and went in for a redo. Sounds are a bit louder with room for me to adjust as needed, not just having the sound at 100% all of the time and still not enough power to get the sounds around me. It’s better, still have muffled sounds, but it is improving.
My biggest hurdle right now is communicating with people. I do the rehab apps and I score high on the words (bat, cat, dog, ball, throw, see, me, etc). And when I listen to the sentences in the app, I do fine. But listening to sentences in an app made to train CI recipients to notice sounds a bit more is completely different than listening to someone who is just talking. Speech is very much like music. Timing, cadence, timbre, and pitch are a massive part in how people speak. Sometimes it takes me several repeats to catch all of what they are saying. So, it’s better…but it’s also not. It’s improving and I’ll take that for now.
But I’ve also started using something very specific as a benchmark for my progress: Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp in C Major, K.299, particularly the Andantino movement. (Seriously, if you’ve never listened to this movement, you need to, it’s just beautiful). This piece means something to me because I know how it is supposed to feel.
Before my hearing declined so significantly, there was something about the Andantino that gave me this almost weightless, floating feeling. I’ve always described it as butterflies. It wasn’t about being able to identify a flute or a harp. It was the way the entire piece came together and became music rather than individual sounds. Now every so often, I listen to it again. Today, it still wasn’t perfect. I didn’t get the butterflies. But I heard the harp clearly. I heard the flute clearly. I heard the orchestra clearly.
They sounded like separate, recognizable parts of the music instead of everything blending together into an indistinct wall of sound. The overall sound was still a little off, but something else happened that feels much more important: I enjoyed it.
I listened to the entire Andantino movement and for me, that is a huge step forward. K.299 has become more than a piece of music I love. It has become a benchmark for how my brain is learning to make sense of sound again. Speech scores can eventually tell me how many words I recognize correctly in a testing booth. Mapping can tell us how my electrodes are responding. But neither of those things can measure whether Mozart gives me butterflies. I think that will come. Maybe not today. Maybe not next week. But after listening today, for the first time I genuinely feel like I’m getting close.
And when those butterflies finally come back, I’ll know exactly what they mean.
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