The Coppit Family Daily News

This week has been crazy. On Monday and Tuesday, Christopher’s CI was activated. I also had my last shot at the NSF CAREER proposal due on Tuesday. Plus John Regehr passed along a call for the Air Force Young Investigator Program, due on Wednesday.

Over the weekend we had a SIGbeer mini-reunion. So I spent the whole weekend polishing off my NSF proposal, then re-writing it for the Air Force submission.

On top of all that, I’m on Ken Blakely’s thesis committee, which was meeting Wednesday morning for his proposal. I kinda totally forgot about that, but was able to get there in time for the questions, and I met with Ken later in the day.

Whew! Things are starting to get back to normal now. There are 2 or 3 more proposals coming up in the fall, and a couple papers as well, but for now I can take a breath and get some work done.

Last Saturday John, Sarah, and Jonas were all in Charlottesville, so the Englers hosted a get-together at their house. This coincided well with Christopher’s activation the following Monday, so we decided to head up on Friday and stay at Dorothy’s parents’ house through Tuesday.

There were an amazing number of kids. Nearly every couple had at least one, and several had more than one. How things change so fast… It wasn’t long ago that we were all singl eat the Greenskeeper contemplating mixers with the nursing school.
Here’s the album. (Note: You’ll need to log in to see pictures of kids.):

It was really good to catch up with the Regehrs, and to finally meet Jonas, after 1.5 years!

On Monday our son Christopher had his CI activated at the University of Virginia. He was 13 months to the day. We went with the Advanced Bionics device with the BWP. He was really tired on Monday, so we didn’t get really good behavioral indications that he was hearing (except that when the audi turned up the volume he cried).

On Tuesday we went back in for a checkup and increasing of the mapping volume. This time he had a really good nap beforehand, and was quite happy. The audi got him to look up a couple times while he was playing when she sent a tone to his implant.

There’s also a test where one electrode in the implant array acts as a detector, and the other as an actuator. This way the device can measure itself at the point of contact with the auditory nerve. This is really cool, and something I didn’t know they could do. In any case, Christopher’s response curves were textbook-perfect.

Christopher mostly ignores the implant, which is good because we were worried that he’d mess with it. Unfortunately, he also ignores any sound that he gets from it. Hopefully as he explores the world he’ll begin to understand that things have sound. We’re trying to train him to respond to sound, and I guess that will come in due course.

Here’s what Christopher looks like wearing his harness with the processor in it:

Here’s the whole photo album, which includes movies of him responding to sounds as the audiologist tests him: