Better Hearing Consumer

I never met another person with hearing loss until I was 40. Well, there was my great-grandmother who had a voice like a foghorn because of her age-related hearing loss. And through the years I certainly saw people wearing hearing aids – large, beige kidney beans behind their ears, similar to my own. But I never interacted with anyone to

I asked Dr. Louise Sinden-Carroll, the esteemed New Zealand human rights activist, to write a piece for HearingHealthMatters – about 900 words or so.  In this article, she takes a searing and personal look at the impact of unaddressed hearing loss on a unique family dynamic.   – Gael Hannan   By Dr. Louise Sinden-Carroll   Wondering why the shop assistant’s

The Hearing Husband and I seem to get antsy if we’re in one place for too long.  Maybe we just get bored with too much togetherness and decide we need to ‘see the family’, hit the open road and climb a few hills. This means we’re frequently packing and unpacking and packing again. You’d think we’d have nailed the list

Kathi Mestayer is an occasional contributor to the Better Hearing Consumer. This week, she shares two startling discoveries she made when she felt the urge to blow. by Kathi Mestayer Just before the holidays, I was standing at the kitchen counter, listening to NPR’s morning news show, and I felt a little stuffed up. I grabbed a tissue and blew my

  New Year resolutions are never really meant to last the whole year, let alone the rest of our life, are they?  OK, maybe they are, but every year don’t we make the same list of “I am determined to do this” things – eat less, drink less, spend less, smile more, and just be an overall better person? People

For this final post of 2017, I’m reprinting the most-read article I’ve ever posted to the Better Hearing Consumer. Since its original posting in May of 2012, I’ve added cochlear implant batteries to my arsenal of hearing things.  I hope that you’re all having a peaceful and happy holiday season.  Best wishes, Gael Hannan   What I Didn’t Know About Hearing

In this final month of the year, we at Hearing Health Matters are posting what we consider to be our best and/or most popular articles of this and other years. I hope you’ll enjoy reading (or re-reading) this article of stupid hearing loss questions to ask yourself – you won’t believe your answers!     On social media, it’s sometimes tough

As we close off the year, the Better Hearing Consumer and other Hearing Health Matters editors are posting our favorite and most popular posts. The following article is from November 2013, and remains one of the most personal pieces I’ve written. I hope you enjoy it.   If I Were a Hearing Person   When trying to remember a time

It’s not like my feet were pretty to begin with. It didn’t help when I dropped a heavy flooring sample – the thin edge – on my left foot. The toe next to the big one is now the biggest one. We’ve all stubbed or bruised or broken a toe at some point. And if you’re one of the lucky

Ian Kinross is a Toronto-based communicator who has worked in the health and financial sectors. On his blog, kinrosscordless, he writes about community gardening and bike repair and, now, Ménière’s Disease, a condition that puts the inner ear through repeated wash cycles, triggering vertigo and progressive hearing distortion and loss. I asked Ian to write his story for HHTM’s Better