 Hello, and welcome to Rehab at Home with Medell. In this episode, you'll meet Mary Jane and her husband, Nick. Mary Jane has single-side deafness. We'll find out about her decision to get a cochlear implant and what changed for her and what activities helped her develop her listening skills. I had to go and find an ENT. He diagnosed me as having many as disease, which had affected my left side. He couldn't tell me whether it would affect my right side at all, so I decided that I would go for a cochlear implant. To improve how I understand speech, I find using an audiobook has been the most helpful thing. Sometimes I might listen for a couple of chapters, sometimes I might listen for an hour or so. For me to use an audiobook, I will go into town to my local library. I will find a book. I hope that it is available as an audiobook, or I will go looking for an audiobook first and then go into the library and order that book. One of the benefits I find is that I can stream it direct to the audio processor. Therefore, my other side, which he is, is not doing any of the work. The more you listen, the better it gets. When I'm in a group situation, I find that the noise can be quite overwhelming. I find that I have to focus on one person to talk to so that I don't get swamped by all the different conversations that are happening around. One of the really helpful activities that we practice was actually a sound location. And what we would do is Mary Jane would sit in the room and I would move around the room and make sounds that she would recognise from different locations so she could identify where the sound was coming from. Listening to recorded speech through your audio processor alone is essential rehabilitation if you are like Mary Jane and have normal or nearly normal hearing in one ear and use a cochlear implant in the other. Mary Jane showed us how she listens and reads at the same time to teach her brain to recognise the words. This helped her work towards the goal of understanding conversation when in a group. When you are in group conversations, turning to face the person talking helps because you can use speech reading clues. Nick showed us a simple activity he does with Mary Jane to practise this skill. Learn more about how to develop your ability to turn more quickly to the speaker in our sound localisation brochure. You'll find a link in the description of this video. Thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe to the middle blog to get all of the latest Rehab at Home videos straight to your inbox.