Better Hearing Consumer

  By Bowen Tang   Imagine if you are no longer able to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Interference with any of these senses can shake a person’s confidence in navigating their world. For people with disabilities, this is an every-day reality that has turned into a nightmare with the arrival of COVID-19. The barriers and challenges presented by

Who thought that it would come to this?  Who knew that it would take an international health crisis for the light bulb to go on? Not me, I admit. I thought that if hearing health advocates around the world just kept at it with our advocacy, the hearing world would finally ‘get’ what it means to have hearing loss. What

If someone asked me today who I am, one of my answers would be:  I am a person on a long journey with hearing loss, who is still learning things along the way. And most of what I now know, came after the age of 40. Meeting other people like me for the first time, I started to morph from

People with hearing loss – are you finding things funny during the pandemic?  I don’t mean the pandemic itself, just things that may not be funny in normal times, or wouldn’t even happen in normal times. But now, in this insane world, some things just tickle us into a smile. For example, what do some people look like when they’re

Does any of this seem like you, sometimes? Ever? Always?   It’s EASY to convince ourselves that we’re doing OK with our hearing loss: That we’re catching most of what’s said,  At least the important stuff – the rest’s not really worth listening to And no, we don’t intend to do anything about it Like a hearing aid or cochlear

I met and became friends with Anne Sjökvist on a 2018 trip to Scandinavia, where I was giving presentations. Anne is a passionate advocate and works as the Communication Director of the Swedish association for hard of hearing people, Hörselskadades förening i Stockholm. Here is her story of how a simple walk in the woods put into play the challenges

My guest writer this week is Karina Cotran. Karina lives in Toronto and works in communications at Loblaws. She is the author of Hearing Differently: Growing Up With a Cochlear Implant and blogs on Hearing Differently.    “You have hearing loss? But…you’re not…like…old.” This is a common response that I, a 25 year old, usually get when I tell other

I’ve had a cochlear implant (CI) for three years and I don’t regret my decision. How could I, when the cochlea it was replacing was only contributing to 2% speech recognition in the right ear? And I’m sure I only got that score because I guessed correctly. (When you’ve been taking hearing tests for as many years as I have,

If you had only 5 minutes to make a difference in the life of a stranger, how would you use it? I asked this question in an article a few years ago and in this insane time of masks and distancing, I’m posing the question again. It’s a chance meeting – perhaps standing in line, six feet apart, to get

I’m as tired of this pandemic as the next person. But if anything good comes out of this, it could be the world’s OMG moment about the difficulty in communicating with masks. This speechreading nightmare is not limited to people with confirmed hearing loss; mask-reading is proving to be a challenge for good-of-hearing people as well. Even the Hearing Husband