Better Hearing Consumer

  May I be calm and without fear. Tinnitus does not rule me. If you have chronic head noise, you’ll try almost anything to get rid of it. Tinnitus sticks to you in every waking moment, a biting bug you can’t shake off. Science hasn’t yet figured out how to fix the venomous noise in your brain which monopolizes your

  I haven’t yet watched Code of Silence, in which a deaf worker with exceptional speechreading abilities uses her skills to aid criminal investigations. I want to avoid the usual cringing at the myths of hearing loss and deafness perpetuated in popular media. If someone can assure me that Code of Silence avoids these myths, even in the pursuit of

Lately I’ve noticed an uptick in social media posts by people with hearing loss who write about feeling unseen and unheard. Stories about all the moments, small and large, in which they are excluded from communication with others because of not being able to hear. The impact can be powerful, suppressing the strength or courage to speak up and create

A woman will put up with a lot to spend a few glorious days with her Besties at a cottage on a beautiful lake. For me that meant two long flights and bracing myself for the inevitable communication barriers built into the travel-with-hearing-loss experience. Being asked if I would like a wheelchair or a Braille card. Airport announcements, unintelligible and

  As the microphone battery pack inched down inside my underpants, heading towards the leg opening and ultimately to the floor, I thought – Why do I keep doing this to myself?! The answer to that question, every time, is that this is what I love to do. The message is important. Public speaking is one of the most common

  When do we finally get what it means to have hearing loss? When it happens to us. When do we learn how to live well with it? When we’re ready and when we really want to. Which may be very soon, sometime soon, or never. Recently I gave a presentation on hearing loss in the community where I live.

If you have not yet tapped into the world of TEDx talks, you’re missing out. These short talks, usually 10-15 minutes in length, are ‘ideas worth sharing’ delivered by experts from their lived experience. If you want a good source of information not corrupted by media or fringe conspiracies, try TED and TEDx talks. And, if you have hearing loss,

Casual conversations aren’t my thing. It’s not that I don’t like casual chats – I love them! Talking with people is one of life’s joys. But because of my hearing loss, I just don’t do casual very well, especially with strangers. A successful convo that sparks up and ends in just a few seconds or minutes, only works if I

What would your life be like if some major aspect of it had never existed? If you had met someone else to be your life partner? If instead of mediocre, your artistic and physical talents were world-class? If you looked different, or were raised in a different country or culture? If you didn’t have hearing loss? While it’s fun to

  Living well with hearing loss is not instinctive. We must learn how to do it. Nothing in a person’s personal experience prepares them for the emotional, life-changing impact of even a mild change in hearing. We don’t just hop to it, adopting strategies that will help us deal with communication barriers that we never realized existed. Even if we’ve