Better Hearing Consumer

In November 2007, I was invited by the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association—Yellowknife Branch to give a public presentation on hearing loss. The city of Yellowknife sits on the shores of Great Slave Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories (NWT), just 250 miles south of the Arctic Circle. On that trip, I landed at 2 pm and by 3 pm, I was

Turning 60 has its benefits. 1954 was clearly a bumper year for babies, including Oprah Winfrey, John Travolta and, more importantly, me and my friends. I don’t know how John and Oprah celebrated their big Six-Oh, but I’m sure they didn’t have as much fun as my group of girls who, born in different months of the year, saved up

    You’re lying on my bedside table and before I fall asleep I’m looking at you closely for the first time in a long time I’m thinking about how much, to my surprise, I love you—and why.   Well, it’s not because of your looks. One square inch of plastic and wires, Your color referred to professionally as flesh

What the Bert and Ernie Letter Songs Taught Me About Faking and My Hearing Loss By Nancy M. Williams   Fakers. We all know they’re out there when it comes to hearing loss. Of course, it takes a faker to know one. A man stops my daughter and me on the street. Traffic zooms behind him, the roar rushing into

We know about the two most painful words in the hearing loss dictionary—never mind. But how about that SIX-word question that plagues every hearing aid or cochlear implant user: “Have you got your thing in?”  This can set off a bad-hearing moment faster than you can say dead battery. Now, if you are a hearing person reading this, you might think

Do you ever feel that your hearing technology is talking to you, that it’s trying to tell you something? My mother used to say things like that. “Gael, your clothes are trying to tell you something”, meaning they were past due for the laundry, or my outfit didn’t ‘go’ (God help you if you wore black pants with a navy

Legend has it that from the time they first suspect a hearing problem, people typically wait 7 to 10 years before actually doing something about it. That’s a decade—a tenth of a century—of deteriorating communication. Seven to 10 years, wasted! Research shows many reasons why people delay, including a belief their hearing is not all that bad and they can live

What a road trip! Thunderous waterfalls, booming forests and a flare-up of tinnitus that brought the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean up off the beach and inside my head.  It was that kind of trip….jaw-dropping and heart-stopping. Especially when we almost lost the cat. In my blog of August 18th, I introduced Flag, our 32-foot fifth wheel, which is

Recently, my HearingHealthMatters colleague Dr. Bob Martin wrote a post with a suggestion for his fellow hearing care practitioners: have clients write down notes on their hearing aid experiences, so that questions and concerns can be addressed in the next clinical appointment. This great idea got me thinking about what someone bringing home their first pair of in-the-ear (ITE) hearing aids

A few months ago, my guest blogger Lauren Sherwood wrote a poignant and popular piece on the “two most painful words to a hard of hearing person”.   If you have hearing loss, you know what the two words are: Never mind!   The article beautifully expressed the universal stab in the stomach that people with hearing loss (PWHL)  feel every