Introducing My Mom and her Audeo Ventures

In addition to being the Territory Manager for the state of Virginia at Phonak, I am also the daughter of a wonderful woman who is currently wearing the new Audeo V90 10 (yes, ruby red!) hearing aids. My mother has a moderate to severe sloping hearing loss in both ears. Her hearing loss began years ago and has been slowly declining the past 8 years since she was originally fitted with hearing aids. I tell you, it has not been an easy counseling process, getting her to wear her hearing aids regularly, but now, she can’t take them out! Here is what she has to say…

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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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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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Where Do You Keep Yours?

When I first started wearing a hearing aids, I was forever losing them but now they have a home and it’s no longer an issue.

The first hearing aid I had was an in-the-ear kind from the NHS. It wasn’t comfortable and it was set too loud and so I used to take it to work with me and only wear it when I was in a meeting. Consequently, it lived its life mainly in pockets and I spent most mornings trying to retrace my steps to see where it had ended up in order to stuff it in the pocket of that day’s outfit for emergency use only. I then learnt to lipread and abandoned the aid altogether.

When I later needed an aid in my other ear, I purchased some behind the ear aids with receiver in the ear and open fit domes. I mainly managed with just the one aid and so one lived in my ear and the other lived a varied life in pockets, handbags and in its case in various locations in my house. This pair had a remote control, which led a nomadic lifestyle; living in jackets, coats, jeans, handbags, on tables – anywhere its fancy took it. The aid I used to use had a single place I’d put it every night – a little ceramic bowl on my dressing table – but the other aid and remote could end up anywhere.

Almost every exit of the house started with, “Where’s my remote? Where’s my other aid?” and a frantic search. I needed to get more organised. I started to leave the remote on the coffee table every evening and so I knew where to locate it each morning and this worked – mostly.

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The Ups and Downs of Hearing Aid Reimbursement

One of my monthly tasks as Sales Analyst for Phonak is to monitor official market sales data within Europe. Changes to reimbursements and subsidies affect the number of hearing aids that are sold, as funding becomes more or less available to the end user. This has an impact on the trends that can be seen within the market data.

For example, a German court ruling stated that the hearing aid subsidies should rise by 76% to 740€ per hearing aid. No one could have predicted the dramatic effect it would have on the German market.

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So Many Failed Fittings

Again and again, when I talk about my hearing loss and my role as Open Ears editor, people tell me about their relative, acquaintance, or friend who has hearing loss of some degree, got hearing aids, but never wears them. This is a well-known problem in the industry, of course. I haven’t done checking out the existing research on the topic, but after an umpteenth discussion — and a failed fitting in my history — I do have a few thoughts to share.

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What a Sound Difference!

I have been wearing hearing aids all my life, I was born deaf.

I grew up learning to adapt to new sounds and listening from the hearing aids.

But as we all know, hearing aids don’t last forever which means new upgrade, new sound quality, new everything. I have been wearing behind the ear hearing aids since I was a baby. I have had these particular old hearing aids for 10 years.

New hearing aids for Abby.

Ten-year-old hearing aids plus lifestyle changing equals different sound quality and environment. I can say for sure it’s a huge difference and improvement when switching from these old hearing aids to these new ones.

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But Your Hearing is Perfect

We’ve all talked on this blog about how different the perception is between viewing aids (better known as glasses) and hearing aids (better known as “my ears” by people wearing them, and as “prosthetics” by people seeing them). A few months ago we were on holiday at the beach — don’t let me get me started on Corsica, one of the finest places in the world. We spent two weeks there; every day we’d go to the beach and dive among schools of fish.

Blue Corsica

Without my hearing aids, discussions on the beach were some approximate gibberish mixed with outcries from happy children playing around, the buzz from some distant sea scooters, the splashes, the regular pounding of waves. In fact I heard less than half the conversations. But you know how beach conversations go: most of the time it’s more chit-chat than life-changing decisions, so I didn’t really mind and decided to let go. I love reading books on the beach anyway.

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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.

bylanda

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