Archive of Open Ears
Hearing aids can be scary to someone who doesn’t know how they work. So with Halloween just around the corner, we think it’s the perfect opportunity to show kids and their friends that hearing aids are cool!
Continue reading “Cool Halloween Hearing Aids Prove that Technology Isn’t Scary”
For the first 12Ā years of my life, I slept peacefully through the majority of thunderstorms. If I ever awoke, it was during a strike so violent everybody in the house was awake, and huddled in my motherās bed.
With half an eardrum in one ear and no eardrum in the other, the idea of a thunderstorm being frightening seemed silly. Why would pretty flashing lights with next to no sound be scary? As long as there was no thunder, storms seemed like a ridiculous thing to fear.
Summer 2005, however, would change this idea for the rest of my life.
Almost one year after my left eardrum was repaired and half my hearing was restored, the horror of strange sounds hit me.
Continue reading “How I Made My Dog Afraid of Thunderstorms”
When I started losing my hearing at the age of thirty, I was really embarrassed about it and I didnāt want people to know I was going deaf. It felt like a failing and I took the news that I needed a hearing aid pretty hard.
I did not want to accept the diagnosis of otosclerosis. Iād read that it was hereditary and painless and I was having a lot of pain and didnāt know anyone in my family whoād had this condition (although my Grandmother who died when I was five did have deafness of some sort but my Dad and Aunt donāt know the cause). Most of all, I just didnāt want to accept that I was going deaf.
Continue reading “My Strategies for Coping With Single-Sided Deafness”
The 8th to 12th September is Lipreading Awareness Week in the UK and so my post is in honour of the Lipreading tutors around the world. Thank you for all you do!
When I got my first analogue aid, I shoved it in a drawer because it amplified everythingĀ and the sounds of cutlery or a running tap scared the living daylights out of me. Nobody checked up on me and it was left up to me to ask to be referred to a different hospital where Iād discovered they were (at that time) trialling the use of digital hearing aids.
At the second hospital, I was given an āin the earā aid and told to ābuild up use gradually from an hour a day to all dayā. The hearing aid was set far too loud and the audiologist refused to turn it down to make it bearable (let alone comfortable) and so, it too got shoved in a drawer never to see the light of day again.
I then enrolled on a lipreading class.
Continue reading “Thank You to All the Lipreading Tutors Out There”
“I don’t hear very well.” This is what Iād been saying since I discovered, age 13, that I didnāt hear very well. āI donāt hear very well.ā My hearing was checked, I was given the verdict āyeah, so you have some hearing loss, weāre going to give you hearing aidsā, and sent to an audiologist to be fitted. They took some measurements, filled my ears with pink stuff, and next time I went there I left with a rather big pair of skin-coloured inside-the-ear aids.
They felt uncomfortable, I could hear background noise, the world was too loud, and girls at school made fun of me. I wore them two days, maybe three, then put them back in their box, never to be taken out again. I decided that it wasnāt that bad after all to ānot hear very wellā, and that I would cope.
And I did, for the next 25 years.
In 2012, after a couple of years of āgetting thereā, I finally decided to get fitted again. My brother had got hearing aids a few years before and what he told me of the process and the changes in his life really encouraged me. (We have similar hearing loss, hereditary.) I shared some of my thoughts on my blog right after getting my hearing aids (āA Week With My Superpowerā) and a month or so later (āMore About Hearing Aidsā¦ā).
Nearly two years later, my hearing aids are part of my life, and I wonder why I waited so long. I still end up saying āI donāt hear very wellā every now and again, but now I can add āIām not wearing my hearing aids just now,ā or “Even with hearing aids, I don’t hear as well as you.” The impact is different!
