Better Hearing Consumer

The Ida Institute is an organization for hearing healthcare professionals, which is something I’m not. I sit in the other chair in the clinic. I’m the one they put in the sound booth for my annual torture, uh, hearing evaluation. I’m the one who needs and uses the services of healthcare professionals. So why am I such a big fan

I’ve got a secret and if you have any degree of hearing loss, you’re keeping a secret too.  We don’t understand what people are saying, even though we pretend to. Yes, that’s the secret. We fake comprehension. We try to pass as people who understand you as you speak, looking like we’re soaking up every word. We don’t do this

Some people tear off their hearing devices as soon as they walk through their front door. All day they’ve suffered the onslaught of noise – words, sounds and simply noise-noise. Their brain is fried, and they need to not be processing anything for a while. They yank off their hearing aid or cochlear implant sound processor and settle into the

Most people, upon getting the news that they have hearing loss, don’t receive the diagnosis as if it were nothing. “Oh, I’ve got hearing loss? Alrighty then, thanks a lot for telling me.” Maybe some people take the news calmly, both inwardly and outwardly, but if we could read the  thoughts of most people, we’d see something more along the

I don’t know what to say about tinnitus because it’s an ornery beast. I don’t even like to say the word (tinnitus), because it responds to its name with even more loudness. OK, maybe I can say a few words about it. Tinnitus is annoying, frustrating, loud, keeps mixing up the sounds and moving from one side to another. It

The salesperson is facing you. There is almost no background noise and you’re wearing your hearing devices. Since it’s just the two of you, this is shaping up to be an accessible conversation. Then she starts to speak and you realize that all the bad speaking habits seemed to be rolled up in this woman. She speaks softly, her lips

People with hearing loss are cheaters. Well, most of us are. And we don’t cheat all the time – just when other people are talking to us. Which is a lot of the time. But saying that we’re cheaters doesn’t mean we’re not nice people. Most of us are fabulous! We just have a little problem: ‘fessing up when we’re

Hearing aids have yet to reach the same level of high fashion as eyeglasses. But they’ve come a long, long way and so has public attitude towards them. But until recently, personal hearing technology was still big and ugly, which helped explain the distaste that people had for using them. At least, that’s how I felt when I got my

Do you ever wonder where you and your hearing loss belong? When trying to adjust to life with hearing loss, many people say they feel caught between two worlds – the Deaf world and the Hearing world. They feel they don’t fit in with either the world of people who don’t hear anything or in the world of people who

Whether you’ve had hearing loss for a year, a decade or a lifetime, it’s easy to get sloppy on the basics. Maybe we’ve become a little careless with our technical devices (as if they cost a few bucks rather than a few hundred or thousand). Maybe we’ve been backsliding to the days when we tuned out people and activities because