And a year ago at this time....

.... Ben was hearing through his CI for the first time! Meaning that there were whole new worlds of sound that he was hearing, that he'd never heard before.

Here's an excerpt from my diary entry for July 30, 2008:

"Activation Day!!! All went very well. Appointment with [Dr.] Roland [the CI surgeon] this morning (took subway). Killed four and a half hours -- park, aborted attempt at UN grounds, pizza, etc. Ben did so well. And then activation -- got a response, good mood! So exciting. Headpiece comes off a lot, but easy to put back on.... Ben doing very well -- clearly hears some new stuff, not sure what to make of it, but good mood."

Between the appointment with Dr. Roland in the morning, and the activation appointment with the audiologist in the afternoon, we had some time to kill, but we didn't want to travel all the way uptown and back again. So we hung out at a nearby playground (where we've spent much time since, what with all of Ben's follow-up appointments) and then tried to take a stroll around the UN gardens, which Neil remembered as being very beautiful. (The UN buildings were just up the street a couple of blocks.) Except that Neil hadn't been there since before 9-11, and they have really beefed up the security. You can't get to the gardens at all -- and I think they were under renovation, anyway. You have to go through a long security line just to get inside the building. Long story short, we gave up on that plan, but not before waiting in line for a long time and inadvertently taking Ben through a metal detector -- much to our horror! Here we were, just an hour away from activation, and we were terrified we'd just nuked his implant! (Turns out that metal detectors do no harm to cochlear implants, but we didn't know that at the time.)

Here are links to his activation videos, part one and part two. The audiologist turned the lights off, to help direct his attention to the light-up dancing toy, so the video quality isn't great. Also they're long enough that it would take me many hours to caption them, so they won't be accessible to those with hearing loss -- I apologize for that.