 It was when we got home and we were in the house that I started to notice that, well, I was hearing masses of things that I'd never heard before. When you start hearing those things again, it's really quite emotional after all that time. I started hearing sounds in the house that I'd never heard before. And you start, it's quite, you think, just look at that. You switch the light on and it goes, click! I was shocked because the teaspoon was making a noise. It was going, you know, tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. And I was, I stopped and I looked at it and I thought, goodness, that's what stirring a cup of tea sounds like. But I'd forgotten. Obviously, I'd used to be able to hear that. But in recent years, if I heard anything at all, it was thud, thud, thud. But now it was tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. And it was stupidly, it was really quite emotional. It was like, oh, I remember this. I remember this sound. But I'd utterly forgotten that that's what, you know, having a teaspoon in a cup of tea sounded like. It took time and work but environmental sounds, they just happened straight away. And it was a bit of a shock. And it was a shock how much I liked it because I thought I didn't care about that. But when I started hearing them again, I didn't care. I didn't care. After a couple of days, Nigel and I went out for a walk with Izzy. And that was fascinating because it was like a primary school nature walk with me saying, what's that? And Nigel was saying, oh, that's a bird. What's that? That's an aeroplane. What's that? And it was our dog's paws squeaking on the frosty path. And there was a whole variety of sounds, which I was hearing, which I'd not heard for such a long time. It was very encouraging that I was hearing all of this kind of almost immediately. A couple of days later, I was out on my own and a couple of sparrows flew right across in front of me and they were squabbling, fighting with each other in the air and making a racket. I could definitely hear the sparrows. I keep on saying these things are quite emotional, but they are because you think, goodness, I've not heard that sound for so long with birds I've not heard the chirping sparrows song of a bird since my 30s. And so, you know, just a few days after an implant, be hearing a sound and know it's a singing bird or a chirping bird is, I mean, just how extraordinary is that? It's just unbelievable. We were doing the exercises that we had from the hospital. It's a good life. It's a good something. It's a good life. Life. Yeah. Is that your wife? Is that your wife? But to begin with, I was tired a lot. You know, my brain was working really hard to make sense of all this new stuff that was happening. So I was having to take things quite easily as well. I couldn't embark on, you know, hours and hours worth of the exercises because sometimes after 15 minutes I'd be so tired. I'd say to Nigel, stop, stop. I can't do anymore. Is it the knife? Not sure. Is it the... Is it the knife? Is it the knife? Yeah. To begin with, I could hear what I was used to hearing, but quieter because I didn't have my hearing aid in. And then I could hear this squeaking all the time whenever he said anything. It was a bit disconcerting, really, because I thought, well, how are these two things, you know, what's going to happen next? How are these two things going to come together? I started to be aware that if I concentrated on the squeaking, it wasn't actually just squeaking. It was speech. But you didn't immediately realize that because it was much easier for my brain to latch onto the quieter sounds, the more low sounds that it was used to hearing. So after a while I started concentrating on this and thinking, goodness, yes, that is Nigel talking. It's just a different kind of octave of Nigel talking. So I think the next day I started really trying to concentrate on that. But it was if my brain was telling me not to. It was if my brain was still desperately hanging on to the quiet sounds of what it had got used to Nigel sounding like. And it didn't want to pay attention to this ludicrous squealing that's coming in the right side of my head. And I remember having a sort of argument with my brain, strange though that is to explain, because I began concentrating. I'm saying to it, you know, this is Nigel speaking and my brain is desperately, desperately trying to ignore this squeaks and squeals and as if my brain is saying, no, no, forget that, forget. I don't know what it is. Nigel is this low-pitched person. And eventually I just kept on doing that. And eventually it's a funny thing to say, but it was almost as if I could sense my brain beginning to realize that this was also speech, that it was thinking, oh my goodness, yes, this is Nigel. It's a different Nigel, but this is Nigel. And it sounds stupid to say all this, but it's how it felt. It's really how it felt. And there was a huge amount of concentration on my part to try to latch onto that and realize that there was something happening here. And also I could hear consonants, which, yeah, I could hear some consonants before, but mainly consonants had gone. So it was really exciting to listen to this and to think, you know, that's a consonant. I'm hearing a consonant. So we persevered with that. And it was like that for two days. And then I was thinking, what's going to happen next? How does this resolve itself? And then the strangest things happen on the night of the second day I went to bed. And on the night of the third day, on the morning of the third day, sorry, I got up and my brain had merged the two things together. It was the most bizarre thing. It was if it said, right, I give up. I give up. This is Nigel. It's all Nigel. We're going to listen to it all in one. And I don't understand how the brain works, but that was such a peculiar thing. It was like it had a night to think about it and then came up with a new strategy. To begin with, it sounded like a very strange accent as if it wasn't the person I'm used to hearing. It was Nigel with a different accent somehow, which is plausible because I was hearing sounds I'd not heard for a long time. It was a bit odd. I kept teasing him that it was as if he had a certain English accent, which he doesn't. And then over time that went away and he now sounds perfectly normal, whatever normal is. But yeah, those only few days were really interesting. And I thought, and it still intrigues me what the brain was doing at that point because you could almost feel it happening. When the two things merged together, it was really exciting because it was like, okay, I didn't know what was going to happen and now something has happened and it will continue being like this. And it was very gratifying that you could feel progress happening. And at that point, things weren't easy, but the fact that the process was actually starting was really encouraging.