Monday's painting...

... Back after a very long day. Drop dead tired here. Been asleep this last hour.
Decided not to do the local vet. Didn't have good feeling about local vet for today. So popped Popeye back in between my blankets. He seems pretty good this morning. Did the hot compress again. He seems lively enough, but knows if I pick up my phone and put it in my bag, then I am going out. And so he just settles in my bed until I get home.

So I decided to do my plan B, which was the teaching vet hospital after I came back from my hospital appointment.

I only just made it in time after I found a parking space at the hospital.

A long appointment. I now have a new Cochlear speech processor. I had a yearly review which includes checking how I am hearing etc, and if the current program I had (before it corrupted) was still any good. It wasn't. So I am listening to various testing tones (low and high), while they adjust each of my 18 channels (4 channels don't work) ( I think you have 30,000 plus channels in each of your ears if you have natural hearing). My tinnitus gets in the way of this testing making it difficult for me to know the difference of the audiologist's sounds and my tinnitus which tries to copy the sounds...

More stuff, then she connects me to my speech processor and turns me on. Then speaks...I cannot make out what she says, it is so distorted. She tells me it might be a month or so before my brain adjusts to this new mapping. And it might not adjust, and I might have to go back and be remapped. This is normal, I know this. I have never had normal hearing, I was born profoundly deaf, so my brain doesn't have a baseline to work from to identify sounds, so it is a hard slog, and my brain goes awol at times with all this confusion for all this. But I have to admit that 12 years after the Cochlear operation, and to keep going through this when I am remapped, is not what I was expecting, nor warned would happen. I am getting too old for all these disturbances for my brain and its neural pathways trying to make its own sense of these sounds. Anyway, it is what it is.

So back home. Tired. A cuppa. Popeye on harness and lead and off the other direction to the teaching vet hospital. There is plenty of parking there, Popeye is in the seat of my walker (a new experience for him, he was a little wide eyed). I go to the counter, there are a lot of people with all kinds of small animals and creatures, but I get seen to very quickly. It is a nice place. All are very kind, the receptionists are exceptional and they gave an email to contact them in the future (it gets checked at least 3 times in the day), and a text number that I may use in emergencies. So good provision for a deaf person, they were very accommodating. Antibiotics for him. He is doing fine. I did all the right things yesterday. So came home. Fell asleep on the couch, Popeye is in the kitchen on the shelf over the radiator, I turned it on as soon as I got home. He has eaten. I made miso soup with some tuna fish dried flakes. Then I gave Popeye a couple of the fish flakes...he looked puzzled but ate them.

Going to bed now, yawning my head off. Going to get Popeye so I can shut inner bungalow doors (for fire safety).

Will catch up better tomorrow.



Top painting is A5 sized mixed media paper and watercolours. Bottom painting is on the C6 sized index card. Similar paintings but both look different. Did these in the early hours of this morning, as I wasn't sleeping...