Playing sports with your C.I

Over the past few weeks, I have seen people asking about how do I wear my C.I while playing any sports !

Lets start with managing C.I - I do have small ears, and everyday I wear a small 'Huggie that attaches to my C.I which looks like this:

Wearing a 'Huggie' with my C.I has made a big different to me. Even though I had a smaller T-mic, the implant would still fly off. So, wearing a 'Huggie' with your implant to wrap round your ears should help you

Not only I wear a huggie while playing sports. With my huggie, I tend to wear a small sports material elastic band instead of those big headband. I place the band over my head by but putting the coil wire underneath. That also stops the implant from falling off and of course the coil doesn't come off as much as it used to. Placing the handband on top the coil wire doesn't affect the sounds coming through to your ears. I found that big material head bands tend to make a lot of rustling noise and it still made the implant falls off.

I wear the band in all the sports I play all sort of sports such as football, tennis, running, gym etc. I would recommend it to other C.I users that are playing sports to wear it.

Recently Advanced Bionics has been testing the new T-mic ear mould (pictured below) This can be another way to prevent your cochlear implant from falling off.



Sometimes while playing sports, you don't always hear the whistle even if your wearing your implant, as you too busy focusing on the game. There has been times where I was playing football and I had the ball, continued to run and the referee would blow his whistle and I am still running with it.

So, what should I do to prevent this?

To help me from knowing when to stop, or when its a foul. I ask my referee to hold up a flag which he hold throughout the match. Every time he blows the whistle he would raise the flag up in the air too.; that helps me a lot. Sometimes when they are behind you and you don't hear the whistle or hear the flag you would still continue to run. This problem, I manage to solve with my team mates. I teaching my team some deaf awareness and ask them, if I had the ball and the referee blows his whistle, all my team mates would stop and stand still. That way, I can see why the game has been stopped because no-one moving around.

playing as a team, you get players shouting my out my name when they want the ball, then when I don't hear it, it goes someone else. After I had problems with this situation. I taught my team mates to wave at me as they are shouting my name which made the teamwork much better.

I There are loads of issue out there that can be dealt with. if you have any question about this post. e-mail me, hopefully I'll get back to you

katie-louise x.