Better Hearing Consumer

By Kathi Mestayer   Visits with my family are always a challenge, to varying degrees. All of the adults who share DNA are hard-of-hearing. Dad, who is 93 now, has a cochlear implant in one ear and the other ear is deaf. His wife, Mary, has hyperacusis, or extreme sound-sensitivity, so conversation can get tricky.  On my last visit, they

We blame IT on our hearing loss. On stress. On overexposure to loud noise. On medications. On illness or disease. On the treatments for illness. On pregnancy. On getting older. On we-haven’t-got-a-clue! The IT is Tinnitus, or “T” as many sufferers call it, not wanting to legitimize it by giving it a name. There are many causes of “T”, but

For first-time users, wearing hearing aids can be a love-hate affair. The ‘love’ might be better termed as an “OK, fine, I’ll-wear-them” type of emotion. For people who have worn hearing aids for a long time, there’s more love than hate. And a better term for ‘hate’ might be ‘mild irritation with’ or ‘wouldn’t it be nice not to wear

Whether they realize it or not, most people read lips to some degree. People with hearing loss read lips to a large degree – almost every time they are listening to or talking with someone. It can be a shock to discover, after developing hearing loss as an adult, that your partner, children and friends do not “give good lip”

People with hearing loss often moan that ‘hearing’ people just don’t get what it’s like to have hearing loss.             They think we use sign language.             They don’t realize we need other types of visual information.             They call us from another room or start talking before we’ve tuned in.             They sometimes yell

Phonemes, visemes and homophenes. Try saying that 10 times real fast. Really – try it! If you’re like me, after the second repetition, it comes out all jumbled.  Which is very ironic for people with hearing loss because these three terms relate to issues of speechreading, which all of us do to some degree in order to understand the spoken

After 40-odd years of using various pieces of assistive technology, you’d think I’d be well past the basics – you know, like knowing how to turn it on and off. But I haven’t. Technology continues to floor me as much as it did when I was in my 20s. At that time, the only electronic, electric (I think those two

I admit that the event crept up on me; I didn’t even know it was “a thing”.  But on February 25th, when dozens of posts and tweets jumped out at me bearing the hashtag #cochlearimplantday, I sat up and took notice. After decades of hearing aid use, I had never expected to be a cochlear implant recipient, yet here I am,

One of the joys of getting brand new hearing aids or getting a cochlear implant (CI) is the new sounds that come on your radar. As a hearing aid user, I loved how sounds popped up out of nowhere, shooting new information to my brain. Sounds were louder and crisper and the hiss of the ‘s’ sounds almost drowned out

(Note: HoH = Hard Of Hearing = Slang acronym for a person with hearing loss.)   You have hearing loss and you’re finally admitting you might need a bit of help – who you gonna call? Maybe you mumble to your doctor something about your ears, perhaps it’s wax, or…. Maybe you take your neighbor’s advice and go directly to a