 I have been using the implant for nearly a year and it's been a good year. When I first lost my hearing I was quite scared. I isolated myself dramatically so the people that I interacted with were mostly my family and close friends. Communication at that time was difficult. Especially in social engagements where you don't want to be rude, everyone's smiling and laughing and so you would smile and laugh along with them, but you have no idea what's going on. I've probably tried to help Theresa in the practical ways of helping her to communicate on the phone and helping her interact without trying to be too overbearing whilst doing that so that she could also maintain a bit of independence and confidence. Being diagnosed in October and then I didn't have the implant until the following August. So it was almost a year, especially when I wasn't getting much benefit from hearing aids. It was a year of no work, no social engagement and being very isolated was a very hard time for me. Since she left high school that's what she's wanted to do so she's derived a lot of her sense of purpose from pharmacy and that profession. I had to quit my job where I was working in the Sunshine Coast. There's a lot of risk involved especially with being a pharmacist if you can't understand someone. There's a lot of error that's there so if I'm misdiagnosed or don't hear the right name of a medication that's a lot of risk for an employer to have. She's gone from anxiety about actually dealing with people because she was nervous about that interaction and how she would perform and function and be able to handle it to now she's just started to work in different places and she's now confident to actually do that from a professional thing as well as a personal one. So yeah the changes have been dramatic, it's been good. My switch on day actually came about quite quickly. I wasn't expecting to be switched on for another week so it was pushed forward a week because I healed so quickly and things were going really well and when I got switched on just little noises like people breathing and the shuffling of paper on the desk was probably the thing that sort of made me jump a little bit and to hear Alice properly for the first time, my audiologist, that was a surprise. It was a good day, I cried a little and yeah I just didn't want to have too high of expectations but I think it ended up exceeding them so it was good. Everyone wanted to know what it sounded like and just trying to describe to people what it sounded like was a little bit electronic and the best example I could give was Stephen Hawking and everyone told me, especially Alice, my audiologist, she said that it will get better and I sort of didn't believe her in the beginning. I thought this is just what it's going to be but I started to notice that people who I was constantly in contact with like my mum and my partner started to sound more normal, started to sound like themselves and Alice kept saying to me, practice, practice, practice. So I would just listen to music, go to the cafe and just go about my normal activities that I enjoyed and eventually after a few months things just started to sound normal. I could tell cars were cars and bikes were bikes and everyone started to sound normal. I've started to attend Zumba classes. I've told the instructor that I have a cochlear implant and after like my first few classes they said, we don't even notice. And I don't notice either. I can follow it, understand it, enjoy it. It's great. Anyone that's told for the first time that Theresa has a cochlear implant, they're first the face of surprise and then they're always a little bit, oh really? There's never an assumption because they would never assume that there is any impairment at all there. I was actually really nervous about going to the cinemas and I put it off and I put it off. My friend took me and we didn't have the telecoil system but I ended up not needing it at all and I could enjoy the movie. I could understand there was no subtitles and that was a happy moment. I really enjoyed that. So I've gone to the movies several times since. Yeah. You know, very enormously proud of her. Yeah.