Better Hearing Consumer

Optimists see the silver lining in the dark clouds.  Creative people  people make lemonade out of lemons.  Determined people make that lemonade – then sell it and share it. Meet my friend Laura Mather.  by Laura Mather Noisy workplace Sudden onset hearing loss Family genetics predisposed to more hearing loss Cochlear implant Near-total bilateral deafness The above is the bare bones

I’m a huge fan of speechreading. I have to be – because if I couldn’t speechread, the hearing I do have would fall below the floorboards. (That’s why I’m trying so hard, in the above picture, to speechread my friend Ray Wathen and his full-blown Texas drawl.) Actually, my hearing would be the same as always – not good –

Uh-oh. The holiday season is coming. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Remembrance Day, Milad un Nabi, Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, and a few others.   At this point in the calendar, most people are, like, yay-hooray! But others, the ones who have hearing loss, may have a little dread and nervousness mixed in with the excitement. It’s not that we don’t love the decorations,

Hey girlfriend! If there’s one thing I’d like you to do for me It’s to move your lips more, so that I can see What you’re trying to say.   We’ve been friends forever and I can tell what you’re thinking, It’s the way your mouth says stuff that confuses me, Because they don’t move. Not much. Except when you

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