Whoops, I missed your post! I had my surgery last week, and it went really well. They did put a patch on my neck before knocking me out. I only had one side effect from the patch, and that was an extremely dry mouth. Well, I guess it wasn't so much a dry mouth as a dry taste. Nothing tasted very good at all - even the chicken noodle soup tasted dry! Recovery was great, though I quickly discovered that trying to fight off the anesthesia was a losing battle.
The worst part of the whole thing was really just the nausea from taking a Percocet or two, bleh. My stitches camne out yesterday, and my activation day is August 15th.
I'm very curious - did you implant your worse ear first, and what was it like suddenly having that ear become the better ear? Did it take a while to adjust to having one good/implanted ear? Was it overwhelming at first? Are you glad you implanted both ears now?
Sorry about all the questions. I'm just really fascinated with the idea that my worst ear will soon become the better of the two. For instance, I cannot use the phone with my right ear at all, so I cannot imagine suddenly relying on that ear for this and other things. You know, it's just a little hard to imagine. 
