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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Why The Stigma is So Sticky

by Kathi Mestayer Years ago, I read that if you lose your hearing (relatively) young, you adjust to it better. That makes sense, given what we now know about declining brain plasticity as we age, and the importance of getting cochlear implants (for those who need them) as early as possible, so their brains are better able to adjust to

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Traveling Without Unraveling

I just returned home from one of my favourite weeks of the year. The annual convention of the Hearing Loss Association of America (HLAA), held this year in St. Louis, is a fun few days of hanging out with a thousand best friends and learning about stuff that will help me communicate better. This year there was a baseball game

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Their Words Keep Flowing

A couple of weeks ago, in my blog The Joy of Writing (About Hearing Loss), I recommended that people who have hearing loss may want to try writing: “…as a way to deal with the frustrations and anxieties of communication challenges. Write a piece of inspiration that gets you through the hearing loss day and stick it on the fridge.

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The Hearing Loss Competition

We all know competition freaks—those people who have to be first, or the best, or win at everything they do. It’s amazing what people will compete over—who had the most dramatic “I almost died” incident, who lost the most weight and what’s the best way to lose it (dill pickles and coconut water). If you tell a funny story about

Featured image for “The Joy of Writing (About Hearing Loss)”

The Joy of Writing (About Hearing Loss)

Writing—about hearing loss—is on my mind this week. Here I am surrounded by the fabulous scenery of Newfoundland, as far east in Canada as you can go without falling in the Atlantic, but still, writing is never more than a few seconds away from my mind. Firstly, David Kirkwood, the fabulous and beloved editor of HearingHealthMatters.org (HHTM), has retired after

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Selecting What to Hear

My guest writer this week is Robin Itzler, a 40-year marketing and communications professional. Robin is a columnist, public speaker and business owner who has a clear vision of her hearing loss identity. By Robin M. Itzler I have selective hearing, but the truth is that everyone with a hearing loss has selective hearing; it’s just that we’re not

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Hanging Out with the HoHs

There’s nothing like an intimate gathering of 150 people with hearing loss. A little bit on the noisy side, but that’s what exhilaration sounds like: people—whose sole, mutual goal is to communicate—connecting to and understanding what’s being said, regardless of who’s saying it. I’ve almost completed 72 hours of recovery from the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association’s (CHHA) annual conference,

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Mama-Nana-HoH!

I am delighted to offer this article from my good friend Teri Wathen, a Hearing Resource Specialist in Houston, Texas. By Teri Wathen We are a family of HoHs—the insider term for people who are Hard of Hearing. I wear two cochlear implants and my husband Ray wears hearing aids—sometimes. He lost some high-frequency hearing while firing weapons in

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The Ecstasy of Seeing the Words

It’s difficult to describe. For people who don’t need it, real-time captioning is a very cool thing. Especially seeing it for the first time. It’s awe-inspiring to watch a captioner produce, verbatim, a speaker’s words, often just a hair of a second after each word is said. “It’s amazing how you do that!” they say. These same people have

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Sneaky Tricks to Hear Un-Hearable Sounds

Oh, those people with hearing loss! Always going on about how we can’t hear this and we can’t hear that, wailing over the sounds missing in action, like the almighty “S” in speech or breezes in the bushes. One of the bitterest pills of hearing loss is that even if we use assistive technology and even if we faithfully practice good