Talk to Me: Hearing is Not Listening

I’m a talker. Have been since my first words, or so the legend goes. Even as I became part of the “hearing lost” I didn’t stop talking.

According to my audiologist when we lose hearing we have two choices, really — to recede and/or to step forward. Or in my case, to do what has always come naturally.

Being a talker with a hearing loss hasn’t always been a good thing. In fact, it’s caused me countless embarrassing exchanges more times than I have data for.But I discovered that if I talked I didn’t have to listen — or listen as much. I would simply try to outrun the speaker’s attempt at a conversation. I would try to anticipate where the conversation was going and leap into the middle of it with some confirming words or experiences of my own to try that might match the “attempted” conversation.

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BiCROS Aids — They’re Magic

I started with single-sided deafness when I was thirty. As time passed, I often thought that even if my deafness in that ear eventually became profound, I would be able to manage so long as I had hearing in my other ear. Then otosclerosis developed in my other ear and I needed to wear a hearing aid. The aid, lipreading and positioning strategies enabled me to cope and continue my job as a trainer for a local authority.

And then, (if you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know) I lost the hearing in my better ear quite suddenly and my single-sided deafness switched sides: the severely deaf side was now the ‘good side’ and the ‘good ear’ was now a ‘dead ear’.

It was a confusing time – not least because after years of ‘positioning’ everyone to my left side, I now needed to do a complete switch. Not that I left the house much immediately after the sudden deafness, but when we did, my husband Richard and I both kept getting muddled up about which side we needed to walk on or where to sit.

As a consequence of my sudden deafness, I discovered the CROS hearing aid and the BiCROS system.

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Good News About the Phonak Audeo V for This Singer  

I am having an exceptional experience with a new Phonak Audeo V hearing aid which I received on January 23, 2015. It’s one thing hearing sounds more clearly than I had previously, but as a singer it’s quite another to be able to hear many more facets of my voice than I had been hearing for decades with other aids.

I’ve been a professional singer and recording artist since the ’70s. I studied voice, speaking and acting for years in New York and worked very hard at creating a voice and a style that employed my musical gifts and talents. But when I lost much of my hearing between 1978 and 1982, I also lost touch with that voice and all I had worked so diligently and passionately to develop and perfect.

Scroll ahead to today and moving beyond the challenges I’ve faced, the news is better.  

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Making a Difference in Haiti

Getting involved in charity work raises a lot of questions on what the right way to do things is. I have the privilege of being a member of the Hear the World Foundation since it was initiated in 2006. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to help.  But spending the money wisely is not as easy as it sounds. What kind of projects should we support? How do we define sustainability? There are so many deserving projects out there, how do you choose?

One learning has been the importance of visiting projects personally. It’s been a mere week since I returned from Haiti. I cannot stop thinking about what I have seen there. You can say it has truly gotten under my skin.

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When Do You Wear or Remove Your Hearing Aids?

As somebody with mild/medium hearing loss, I guess wearing hearing aids are more of a choice than a necessity for me. I mean, I functioned without them for nearly 40 years. Today I wouldn’t give them up for anything in the world, of course, and I really prefer wearing them for anything resembling human interaction. But I can get by without. (An audiologist I had a chat with one day told me I’d be surprised at how people with much more hearing loss than me “get by just fine” without aids. Anyway.)

So, when do I wear them, when do I remove them? As a general rule, I wear them when I leave the house. (My cats aren’t all that talkative.) I remove them when I get home. Since I got my V90 aids though, I often forget to remove them when I get home.

I don’t wear my hearing aids to watch TV.

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Not all Hearing Dogs are Labradors

I’ve wanted a Hearing Dog so much for so long — but I thought it might never happen. When life throws you curveball after curveball, it’s easy to become a pessimist. But on a sunny day in January 2015, I found myself on my way to the Hearing Dogs for Deaf People’s Beatrice Wright Centre (named after Lady Beatrice Wright, co-founder of the UK charity) in the rural location of Bierley in East Yorkshire.

Hearing Dogs are trained to alert deaf people to specific household sounds and danger signals in the home and when out and about. Since dramatically losing most of my hearing, I became convinced that a Hearing Dog would help give me confidence and independence I had lost, and so I embarked on the application process.

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Talk To Me: Getting Along

For much of the past 37 years in which I’ve been, let’s say, “engaged in hearing loss,” I’ve played the good soldier. I reject labels like “suffering from,” and try to limit my whining unless it’s absolutely necessary.

I get my hearing aids, have the appropriate adjustments made, employ compensatory techniques and body positioning strategies, and bluff my way through thousands of interactions. By necessity I curtailed listening to and making music and attending concerts, shows and events, stayed home a lot, endured the requisite stress, embarrassment and isolation, and came to look upon my hearing loss as a kind of badge of courage.

And in all that time, I have done my part to be a good listener, too, because, well, that’s what we do, isn’t it? It’s up to those of us engaged in hearing loss to try and fit into the hearing world, right?

Then, a while ago, it hit me.

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The Road to Fulfillment Leads Through Haiti

Ever since I’ve returned home from my trip to Haiti with our Hear the World Foundation, seemingly everyone I’ve come into contact with has asked me the inevitable question, “How was Haiti?” My answer to this question has always been some variation of “I can’t possibly put it into words,” yet here I am again trying to put my entire Haitian experience into words.

If I get nothing else across about my Haitian excursion, I want everyone to understand that it was a profound experience in so many ways and has changed my life. I’d like to think that I’m self-aware enough to realize exactly all the ways in which this experience enriched me, but I’d be giving myself entirely too much credit if I thought that I had realized everything there is to realize.

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Cheating the Test

It has been said that cheating is wrong, dishonorable, and hurtful towards others as well as yourself. The measurements for final scores become skewed, making the results incorrect for everyone, including you. I learned not to cheat on 99.9% of tests when I was fourteen, after I was nearly expelled from middle school for cheating on a science exam. Since that grievous mistake, I have taken honor codes very seriously and resolved to never cheat on an academic exam, even when I feared being kicked out of my major or not making graduation.

There is one test, however, which I always cheat.

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My Venture Experience

When we first launched our Venture platform in October I chose to wear the aids myself for a little over a month. I wanted to experience the overall sound quality, function of the new AutoSense OS as well as evaluate the new music program.

My first exposure to Venture was my boss (Tom) sharing his reactions when he was first fit. Tom was raving about the overall sound quality and “natural sound”. The most telling part regarding his Venture experience is the number of hours his aids are being worn every day. His last hearing aids would have had a very low number (I had seen 1-2 hours in the past) in the “hours per day” column of data-logging in the fitting software. He is now averaging 10 hours a day. You can imagine how happy that makes his family as well as his work family! He reports that this is specifically due to the natural sound quality and quiet chip in these products. He can put them in and forget he is wearing them.

I had a tendency of wearing new hearing aids in the past when I was working as a clinical audiologist. I liked to experience them myself for a while in order to be able to counsel effectively (and remember those little details – once you hear the low battery beep you have like 20 minutes to get a new battery in there). I function with a mild high frequency hearing loss in each ear named after the musicians who helped me acquire the pesky little notches. I find aids programmed to a flat 30dB threshold are most comfortable so that is where I set the Venture aids. The longest I wore different hearing aids before these was Spice+ for over a month. Other products (Quest, Core) and other manufacturers I tried out in my previous setting I would generally aim for a week or so for their try out.

My takeaways:

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