Only a Person with Hearing Loss Can Tell You This

Dear Readers:

During this holiday season, the editors at Hearing Health & Technology Matters (HHTM) are taking some time off. However, we are not leaving you without anything to read on our blog this week. Instead, we are publishing a special holiday edition filled with what we call our Readers’ Choices.

Our Readers’ Choices featured this week are the posts published on each of our individual blogs that drew the largest number of viewers during the year. Whether or not you have read these Readers’ Choice posts before, we think you will enjoy them.

Best wishes for a Happy & Healthy New Year!

If you have hearing loss, you probably know a lot about it. Most of it you may not like it, but the more information you have about your hearing loss, the better you will deal with it.

It helps to know, or at least be aware, of what you should do or should not do. Strategies that improve your understanding and practices that don’t. You probably get your information from your hearing healthcare professional, from the internet and/or from consumer hearing loss organizations. And this is all good!

But as a person with lifelong hearing loss, I can tell you this: there’s important info that you won’t get from your audiologist or hearing loss websites. I’m talking about the nitty-gritty stuff, the reality checks and  helpful tips, that only another person with hearing loss can tell you about because they’ve gone through it. 

Here are a few:

Not telling people that you have hearing loss doesn’t help you hear them any better.

After showering, you should wait half an hour before putting your hearing aid in so that your ear can dry completely and prevent kaka from getting into the aid. (An audiologist will tell you this, but only if you ask, “How long should I wait after a shower before putting my hearing aid in?)

Saying pardon once is good. Saying it twice for the same thing is not great, but still OK. But saying it three times makes you sound dense and desperate! If you don’t get what was said by the second try, something has got to change! Ask the speaker to rephrase, or say what you thought you heard and then clarify. Or fix the place you’re in – remember, lighting up, noise down!

You can’t read lips of the person you’re walking beside, without eventually bumping into something.

Saying what instead of pardon is a little rude, unless it’s your family.

Calling to someone in another room isn’t going to work, because you won’t understand them when they respond. It’s no different than them calling out to you, right? Sometimes we, the people with hearing loss, don’t follow our own communication rules.  

In a hotel, even with vibrating alarms and flashing lights to wake you up for an early checkout, you still keep waking up EVERY HALF HOUR to see if the alarm has flashed or vibrated yet.

It’s permissible for speechreaders (that’s us) to tell someone they have spinach on their teeth or whip cream caught in the facial hair around their moth. Yucky, but necessary because we need to concentrate.

You ask to sit in the middle at a large dinner table for a better chance at following the conversation. That would work if the people on the other side of the table are the only ones talking. (Think about it, then get a round table.)

Before you go in the shower, you pat your ears at least 10 times to make sure you took your devices out. And when the water starts, you pat them one more time.

A failproof way to fire up your tinnitus, is to hear the word ‘tinnitus. 

Your hearing aid battery dies. You hadn’t heard the warning signal. For the next 60 heart-stopping, terrifying seconds until you put a fresh one in, you’re convinced your hearing aid is also dead. Every time.

When you tell someone you have hearing loss and they immediately say pardon, you should laugh. Yes, laugh, even though you’ve heard the same stupid joke a million times. It doesn’t have to be big laugh, just a small one, so that you both can move on. Besides, laughter is easy to understand.

******

There’s a lot more ‘stuff’ that only a person who’s one of us, the people with hearing loss, can tell you. Useful, insider kind of stuff. Reach out today to someone like you, today.