Sounds of Spring

Well, this is my first spring with an implant, and like the Fall and Winter before it, the implant has changed my idea of what the season "sounds" like. I just thought I would share some of the things I've heard...

- Aluminum baseball bats at Doug Kingsmore Stadium making a nice pinging noise when contact is made with the ball (which is quite often for the top-10 ranked Tigers, I might add)
- The swish and plink of swinging a golf club and making solid contact with the ball on the tee...if I don't hear the plink that indicates contact, I can count on hearing a number of curse words and profanities :)
- Birds singing their hearts out on a still Spring evening
- Pages rustling in the library as students study for exams (no joke, I get easily distracted in the library now because I can hear such slight noises)

It's always exciting to realize I've heard something for the first time ever. The other day, I was watching a TV special on Pope John Paul II and I got up to use the bathroom, which is in an adjoining room to the room with the TV. Although I was unable to see the TV and the captioning, I realized I was still following along with what was being said on the TV. Documentary voices are very clear and easy to understand, nonetheless, to be in a separate room and still understand and follow along with what was being said was an amazing change from a year ago. A year ago, if I wanted to hear something on TV that didn't have captioning, my chances of doing that were very slim, even for documentary type shows. Now, I can leave the room and barely hear it, and yet understand it well enough to not be lost when I return.

Pretty exciting, huh?