Gael Hannan

Gael Hannan is an author, speaker and advocate on hearing loss issues. In addition to her weekly blog at the Better Hearing Consumer, which has a passionate international following, Gael has written two acclaimed books, “The Way I Hear It: A Life with Hearing Loss”and “Hear & Beyond: Live Skillfully with Hearing Loss”, written with Shari Eberts. She is regularly invited to present her uniquely humorous and insightful work to appreciative audiences around the world. Gael has received many awards for her work that advocates for individuals to become more knowledgeable and successful at dealing with their hearing loss and a more inclusive society for them to live in.

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Explaining Our Hearing Loss to Others

Hearing loss is a two-sided problem. Having it, is on one side. Effectively explaining it to others is on the other. We wonder—why is it so challenging for them to understand the way hearing loss manifests itself in us? It’s not that we haven’t shown our audiogram to the people who need to know—the people with whom we communicate the

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When They Take Away Your Hearing Aids

Being deaf means different things to different people, and so they describe themselves in different ways – a little deaf, Deaf Culture, oral deaf, deaf-deaf, cochlear implant. But to a person who uses hearing aids or cochlear implants, there is a special kind of deaf. It’s similar to when you wake up in the morning, and you can’t really hear

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Hearing The Nuances of Sound

Have you seen that video on social media where a young boy with color blindness puts on special glasses that allow him to see colors? It’s a real choker-upper to witness his instant, powerful emotion at seeing something he’d never seen before, a beauty that had only been described to him, but never experienced. And your eyes may have filled

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A Prayer for Healing of Tinnitus-Stress

May I be calm and without fear. Tinnitus does not rule me… If you have chronic head noise, you’ll try almost anything to get rid of it. It follows you everywhere, this tinnitus, like a biting bug that you can’t shake off. Science can’t figure out how to fix that bug bite that throbs on your arm. It bothers you

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Only a Person with Hearing Loss Can Tell You This

Dear Readers: During this holiday season, the editors at Hearing Health & Technology Matters (HHTM) are taking some time off. However, we are not leaving you without anything to read on our blog this week. Instead, we are publishing a special holiday edition filled with what we call our Readers’ Choices. Our Readers’ Choices featured this week are the posts

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The Silver (Hearing) Lining to 2020 (Annus Horribilis)

As much as we would like to forget it, 2020 will be talked and written about for a long time. It was simply annus horribilis—the horrible year. People with hearing loss (PWHL) didn’t have it any worse than anyone else who was separated from loved ones or who suffered economic hardship or who ran out of things to watch on

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What’s a Little Hearing Loss Between You & Your Dentist?

Today, I had a minor thing done to my two front teeth which had chipped, and from start to finish it was an accessible and pain-free experience. That made it an unusual experience. A few years ago, I wrote an article in the form of a letter to a different dentist, who had given me a root canal, a process

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All is Calm: Our Hopes for Tinnitus

Silent night…all is calm….sleep in (heavenly) peace…. These phrases from “Silent Night”, the beautiful Christmas carol, are the goal for anyone who lives with tinnitus—especially the rough, unrelenting tinnitus that prevents us from getting to sleep, staying asleep, or getting back to sleep when we awake at 2am and the whooshes and whines roar into our heads like trains. We

Featured image for “Welcome to the Club, “Hearing People”!”

Welcome to the Club, “Hearing People”!

Have you been shocked at how masks seem to muffle the sound of what people are saying? Are you amazed at how, when someone puts on a mask, you can’t understand everything they say? You’re a hearing person (that’s how we people with hearing loss refer to you people who don’t have hearing problems). Or so you thought up until

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We Want Captions

We need to see what we cannot hear. When people who are deaf, people who have hearing loss, can’t hear the words, we need to see them being made through speechreading. But that only helps for about half the words, because many speech sounds and words occur out of sight – behind the lips, back in the throat, the tongue