Anyone know anything about hearing loss? Coping with loss? About hearing aids?
Was wondering about treatment and hearing aids, etc. A cheaper way of getting one.
Here’s the thing,
@namasteyall: you might be the last person to realize you need hearing aids, and every day afterward you’re making it harder on yourself and those around you.
We don’t know how much hearing we've lost... until we get back some of it.
[Side note for U.S. military veterans: even if you think your hearing is “not too bad”, and even if you don’t have a VA disability rating, your hearing aids are provided for you from the VA for free. It’s assistive tech whether or not your hearing loss is service-related. The VA wants you to be able to hear in order to avoid a bunch of other (more expensive cognition-threatening) problems. Please keep reading.]My first words to my audiologist were “I’m here at the request of my family.”
Their response was “Yeah, we get that a lot.”
“Lost hearing” is a subtle point. Regaining mine helped me appreciate how much I’d degraded, despite decades of seeing the evidence on my audiograms. In retrospect, I wasted a couple years on whining & sniveling before getting fitted for the hardware.
When you lose more acuity in one ear than the other (at least 15 dB out of 30-40 dB overall) then you also start losing the ability to hear the bearing/elevation of a noise. In my case it meant that people kept sneaking up on me. If I was at the kitchen sink and I turned around to put away a dish, my spouse would be Right. There. Behind. Me, and I’d accidentally collide with her. (All she wanted was a glass of water.) I had to learn to turn my head, check my baffles, pivot in place, and then start moving once the vicinity was clear.
If I was sitting in the side of our familyroom (around the corner from the door) I wouldn’t hear people approaching the room. My first clue would be a flash of motion in my peripheral vision as they came in the room, and it’d usually startle the heck out of me.
We all apologized to each other-- several times a week-- yet I still felt simultaneously ambushed, antagonized, and chagrined. Nobody was happy.
The pandemic made it brutally clear that I was lip-reading the cashiers & clerks in stores with noisy backgrounds. It kept getting worse every month, even as the plastic shields came down and the masks came off.
If your bilateral hearing loss is uneven (that “more than 15 dB difference” again), then doctors get concerned about polyps or even acoustic neuromas. You might find yourself in a MRI getting your head examined while you contemplate your life choices about hearing protection.
I’m medically all right, but if I hadn’t dragged my feet for so long then an earlier MRI exam might have led to faster treatment of unrelated sinusitis scarring. That’s a story for a different post.
Today I’m sporting Phonak Audéo L90-RLs in a matching silver-beige color for my skin tone & hair. They retail for about $3000/pair but the U.S. Veterans Administration buys them by the shipload and gives them away to military vets for free.
Getting the hearing aids still took a couple of appointments beyond the medical exams. The first appointment measured the size of my earlobes and external ear canals. This determines the size of the hearing aid’s shell and the length of the wiring to the speaker by your eardrum. We also consulted a color wheel to choose a shell tint that, um, nicely complements my skin color and my silver-fox hair. Nobody notices the hardware unless the wire glints in the sunshine.
The second visit took about an hour of setup and a few minutes of managing expectations.
The audiologist spent about 15 minutes synching the hearing-aid electronics to my audiogram. Most of my amplification is from 4-8 Khz, and my left aid is working about 20 dB harder than my right aid. The audiologist tweaked those parameters on their diagnostic computer.
While she set up the electronics, I downloaded the Phonak app on my iPhone. (Of course there’s an app for that.) In addition to the “Automatic” default it offers settings for Restaurants, Music, TV, and Calm environments. I can also customize those or add my own. Your chosen brand of hearing aids might even be MFI: Made For iPhone, with even more convenient features.
The app uses three Bluetooth connections: one for controlling each aid and a third for connecting to other audio devices. It took me a long time to understand the third one’s potential.
That third Bluetooth connection offers both a virtual headset (including a mic) and stereo headphones. The headset’s technical term is “hands-free AG audio” with my PC acting as the audio gateway to handle Zoom calls. The "stereo headphone" mode is what you’d expect, without the bass driver. Now I can use my hearing aids as an expensive headset or earbuds-- and their Bluetooth works a lot better with a Windows PC than the version of Bluetooth on my high-end Jabra headphones.
The headset’s virtual mic handles my speech largely through bone conduction, and the quality is similar to a high-quality condenser mic on corded earphones. I’ll still use a podcast mic for better audio recordings but it’ll be nice to record audio (and video) without an entire headset strap sliding across the top of my skull. The Bluetooth connection is very reliable and I don’t need backup gear.
Phonak’s app even includes a movement tracker: now I can count my steps with my hearing aids instead of carrying my phone. Phonak’s business partners also helpfully upsell their health tools of interesting cognition games, background sounds for better sleep or improved focus, and “More coming soon!!” Yay?
That cognition aspect is another important reason for hearing aids. Research shows a moderate correlation between hearing loss and declining cognition. The theory is that if we can’t hear (let alone parse) the activity around us, then we withdraw from society and eventually lose the ability to communicate. I’m still skeptical about the causation but I’m not willing to experiment with the risk. I’d rather wear hearing aids and withdraw from society on my own introvert terms.
After the audiologist walked me through the app, we spent another 20 minutes handling my hearing aids. Their Li-ion batteries last for about 20 hours (longer than I do), and they recharge just like a smartphone. The gear includes a wireless charger to hold them while I’m sleeping.
(Now when I go to bed at night I check that I’m charging my phone, my tablet, our electric vehicles, and my hearing aids.)
Hearing aids also have consumables to swap out every month or two. I learned how to replace the speaker’s tiny earwax traps, the open dome over the speaker (for a better fit in your ear canal), and the plastic molded retention tail that stabilizes the aid in the ear.
Once the audiologist thought I had a handle on the gear, she handed over my goodie bag and I was released to enjoy my better life. That was six weeks ago.
I spent the rest of the day being amazed by every sound. (And probably with a goofy smile on my face.) I can (re)hear rainfall on leaves & grass (not just on gutters & sidewalks). I can hear our neighbor spraying water from a garden hose, and their laundry dryer’s buzzer when it finishes. (“They have a buzzer?!?”) I can hear my spouse’s approaching footsteps before she enters the room. Once again, I can tell when people are walking behind me.
I can even hear my spouse moving around the other end of the house or opening the garage door. She’s not sure how she feels about me regaining my submariner’s enhanced counterdetection ranges.
In other news, as I walk I can hear my heels hitting the ground (or scuffing it). Chewing food (let alone ice cubes) is a completely new experience coming through both the hearing aids and bone conduction. Birds and geckos are noisier than I ever remember. I can hear my keyboard keys clicking on their backplane.
Ironically I’m still hyperaware of transients: dripping faucets, flow noises, motor bearings, and slamming doors. I’ve continued to hear these noises every step of the way through the decades of hearing loss, even as I was losing other acuity like picking out conversations in a crowded room. However now I hear transients much more clearly, and I can pick out a conversation from the crowd again. If someone turns on a faucet two rooms away, I can hear that too.
My tinnitus is still with me, and probably will be for life, but it's much fainter. I rarely notice it now.
Next week I’ll check in with the audiologist for minor tweaks on my hardware. When the room is very quiet I’ll occasionally hear a slight electronic echo in my ears from the hardware trying too hard to amplify the background. In quiet areas my left hearing aid reverbs once in a while, which gets annoying. I can use the app’s Calm setting to back off the amplification a bit, but the audiologist can make the change across all settings.
When I’m listening to my desktop PC’s audio and the soundtrack ends, I can hear the carrier frequency. I don’t know whether that’s always been with the PC or if it’s the hearing aids.
Hearing aids are great for clarifying audio, yet they still have their limits. When I want to feel the vibrations of classic-rock bass and percussion in my skull, I still need a set of car speakers or a subwoofer.
I regret that hearing aids are not yet ocean-friendly. Their “water resistant” rating (and their warranty fine print) is more about heavy rain (and heavy sweat) than the action at my favorite surf break. In a couple years, when these hearing aids are obsolete and ready for replacement, maybe I’ll experiment with them in 2-4 foot waves. However if I wiped out on a wave then I’d probably lose them on my first faceplant.
My “waited too long” revelations are all too common with aging. I’ve heard elders (older than me!) say they should have downsized into age-in-place housing years ago. Friends have shared that they waited too long for hip or knee replacements. I know lots of people who wish they’d quit tobacco or alcohol much earlier in life.
There’s a lot of parallels between pursuing better health and pursuing financial independence, like “start as soon as you can.”
And yet I made the same mistake with resisting hearing aids. My hearing is certainly better today, but my listening seems unimproved.
