Better Hearing Consumer

…I mean it. It wasn’t just an opening line to my hearing aid provider, so that she could come back with, “That’s old tech. Your hearing aid manufacturer has a great in-home kit, and a streamer, and lots of other neat stuff for just a few hundred dollars extra.”  Although, that’s pretty much what we said to each other. I

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

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

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. 

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

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

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

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,

I am delighted to offer this article from my good friend Teri Wathen, a Hearing Resource Specialist in Houston, Texas. By Teri Wathen online pharmacy https://animalhealthdigest.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/elavil.html no prescription pharmacy   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

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