Community Blog – Page 15 – Open Ears Archive

The Trials and Triumphs of a City Break in Florence

An ambulance siren wails — and then another — it’s a piercing, high-pitched howl which cuts into my consciousness like a knife stabbing into my head. Slowly, the sound recedes but it is replaced by the peel of the bells of the cathedral, the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves and the rattle of cartwheels over cobbles. I’m on a city break to Florence and the noise is deafening and, at this very moment, I couldn’t have regretted this trip more.

Every Vespa’s engine noise is like a slap around the head. Each time a bus’ air brakes sound, I feel like I’ve been punched. This constant noise pollution is an assault on the senses the likes of which I have never known. It’s exhausting and terrifying in equal measures.

From what I can gather, parks and quiet spaces are hard to come by in this city: it’s not like Paris (ah, Pa-ree!) where you can readily escape to the peace and tranquillity of a public jardin at any time. This is Florence and I’m finding it pretty ‘full on’.

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Art and Resilience: Communication in the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf’s Art Show

I was not sure what to expect when I first visited the art show for the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf.

Through the month of October, Philadelphia’s City Hall has the artwork of deaf children, ranging from ages 5 to 18 in grades k-12. Drawings, paintings, sculptures, and even articles of clothing are encased in glass for spectators to see. Obviously, hearing loss does not impair one’s ability to create visual art. Though I was very excited to see this show, I also wondered what the specific appeal would be for art created by deaf individuals.

Once I got to the show, I was very surprised by the profundity, detail, and depth of each piece on display.

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Tired of Batteries Falling Out of Your Hearing Aids?

Maybe it’s because I’m a newbie (less than three years) hearing aid wearer with mild-to-medium hearing loss, but this has been a subject of continued annoyance for me.

Of course, my batteries aren’t falling out of my hearing aids when I’m wearing them. No, they tend to fall out when stuffing them into pockets, bags, drying boxes, jewellery boxes, and all the other various places I put them (shhh I know it’s bad) when I take them out of my ears. Which happens, because I like my deafness when I’m alone at home, don’t need extra volume on noisy fellow travellers when I’m in public transport, and use my earbuds quite a bit for phone, music, and podcasts.

Caveat: all this might be way less true now that I’ve tasted Venture.

In any case, even if I don’t change my nasty habits, it seems that now that I’m carrying these V90s my battery-falling-out days are over. Look at the photograph closely (it’s not easy to photograph, and easy to miss):

V90 battery compartment design

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Hearing Aids and Bicycles: Hear Haiti Project With Hear the World

Greetings from Haiti! We are Samantha McKendrick and Marisa Breslin, blogging from the brightly colored picnic table at New Life Children’s Home in Port au Prince.

We were invited by Hear the World to participate in this amazing project known as Hear Haiti. Sam works for Phonak Canada in the Inside Sales Department and Marisa works for Phonak US as a Technical Support Audiologist. We are very excited to work alongside many other Sonova employees representing North America in this inspiring project.

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Parker: The Boy Who Taught Me About Shame

There are very few things about which I feel shame. Shame: “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong and foolish behavior”. Note this: the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.

However, we are often made to feel shame over the silliest things. Some people are made to feel ashamed because their clothes are “so last season”, or they are unable to have a certain amount of income. Many of us who read and write for Open Ears have had at least one experience with shame over hearing loss. But where is the “wrong and foolish behavior” in having ears that do not function as we believe they should? This ill-placed experience of shame causes us to forget what is truly wrong and foolish behavior, which we should justly feel ashamed of.

Sad boy alone in a bare room

How do I know what it’s like to carry a wrong idea of shame? At age 16, I learned what shame really was by becoming a bully.

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Trying Venture: It’s Smooth

A surprise was waiting for me on my last trip to Phonak headquarters in Stäfa, 10 days ago: Venture.

I had an appointment to try some Audéo hearing aids and tweak a few things that were bothering me with the fitting and the settings. As I arrived in the building, I bumped into Ora. I excitedly told her, “Do you know I’m trying Boleros? And I like them, there are really situations where they perform better than my old hearing aids.” She answered that she was delighted to hear that. I mentioned some of my beef with Soundflow. “You should try Venture! Are you going to try Venture? Tell them to make you try Venture.”

Venture? Phonak’s new platform (chip, software) for Audéo.

I headed towards the audiology lab and was welcomed by Michael and Simone. Here is what they had for me 🙂

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Imagining the Future of Audiology and Fitting

Writing software is great!

You get to tell a computer, a machine, anything that holds some kind of electronic intelligence, what it should do. Isn’t that great and liberating?…

That is, until you start feeling selfish for repeatedly executing this demonstration of power. Then bringing your semiconductor pal into submission ceases to be funny.

Well, unless you do write code for a greater good.

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Basketball, Twitter, and Hearing Loss Awareness

September was a special month for me. As a basketball fan, I was eager to go home every evening and follow the Basketball World Cup in Spain. On September 9th, Slovenia was playing the USA in the second game of the quarter finals. Although I’m a supporter of the French national team, every basketball enthusiast looks forward to watching Team USA and its constellation of NBA superstars display their high-flying skills on the hardwood.

However, this time around it wasn’t the thunderous dunks of James Harden and Anthony Davis that caught my eye, but an unknown member of the Slovenian team who was wearing a headband. Wearing a headband isn’t anything unusual in our sport but in this particular case I was surprised to notice that it was helping the player hold hearing aids behind his ears. Something that wouldn’t have struck me prior to working for Phonak.

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Now and Then: 10 Years with an Eardrum

If you had asked me how I envisioned my life on August 24^th, 2004, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Heck, I wouldn’t have been able to say anything because of the intubation scrapes on my throat and the tight bandaging around my head. On that date, I had undergone my first tympanoplasty to repair my left eardrum and restore my hearing. With the optimistic outcome my surgeon had promised, I knew my life would drastically improve once I had “perfect hearing” in at least one ear. 10 years later, I looked in a mirror and realized the greatest changes, though made possible by my surgery, were more important than restored hearing.

When I had the surgery, I was twelve years old, trying to find new direction and scared out of my mind of the future. After getting rid of my punk rock spikes and (most of) my clothes from Hot Topic, my wardrobe was in recovery from being my rage outlet at my hearing loss. Underneath my bandages, my hair was short from chopping it off after a decade of ear infections. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be a singer or veterinarian—two careers that demanded normal hearing for very different reasons. My “only hope” of romance was writing obsessively to Tom Felton because middle school boys brutally teased me for having hearing aids. Worst of all, I was plunged into a sea of agony, packing gel, and tinnitus with no guarantee of restoring my eardrum.

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Music Appreciation – Caveats and Limitations

As we all know, music holds a special meaning and connection for each and every individual who listens to it. We all have our own personal preferences to how we like our music to sound and whether we want to hear more bass than treble, more vocals than instrumental, and so on. Each and every one of us has our own personalized “equalization setting” of choice.

This is one of the great things about music. Not only can we make it “our own”, but we can use it to convey a magnitude of information. How many times have you heard only a couple seconds of your favorite song and you immediately thought of a time or place – or how you felt – and instantly it takes you out of your current environment and transports you to another world? So what happens when you lose your hearing? How does music sound then?

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