Better Hearing Consumer

I have some serious issues with mustaches. First, I’m never quite sure how to spell it. Mustache is the American spelling; other English-speaking countries, including my own, spell it moustache. Then there’s mustachio, which sounds Italian but isn’t, and refers to an especially luxuriant growth of hair on the upper lip. Second, I don’t know why mustaches are even there. They

Sometimes – just sometimes – when I mention hearing loss to my family or friends, I hear something, very soft, that I’m pretty sure is the sound of an inner groan. “Oh no, here it comes again. The hearing loss thing.” It’s not that my nearest and dearest don’t care about my hearing challenges, or don’t want to communicate with

Hi, Mom, how’re you doing? Fine, darling! This is a treat – are you staying for dinner? No, I just dropped in for a coffee chat. You usually phone, but this is nicer, face to face. Well, that’s what I wanted to talk… Sorry, dear, I didn’t catch that? …Mom, I didn’t call you, because talking on the phone is

When I first met other people with hearing loss, I was fascinated by their stories, often  inspiring but also heartrending.  Other people had great difficulty in expressing their emotions, and I realized I could help do it for them, by creating  a dramatic, spoken-word depiction of life with hearing loss.  I turned to my friend Dalene Flannigan,  a fellow actor and a

Warning: Some readers may find this blog a bit too gushy and mushy for their taste. This weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving, a holiday based on the English harvest festival of pumpkins and hymns. The earliest North American Thanksgiving was celebrated by the explorer Martin Frobisher in 1578 when he and his men managed to escape the fate of becoming human

I am totally driven by battery power. A battery houses one or more electric cells that produce electricity from a chemical reaction. Cells make things work, including people.  The human body is composed of 100 trillion cells that turn food nutrients into energy that allows people to move and function. So as a human being, I am a battery; I

If I want to understand speech, I have to hear it, or see it, or use an exquisitely-performed marriage of the two.  How I decide on the ratio of hearing-to-seeing depends on the speaker and the medium. For example, the telephone uses 100% hearing because I do well with the voice coming directly into my ear, and with the volume control

It’s EASY to convince ourselves that we’re doing ‘fine’ with our hearing loss: That we’re catching most of what’s said, Well, at least the important stuff – the rest’s not really worth listening to And no, we don’t intend to do anything about it Like getting a hearing aid or cochlear implant – Those are for other people, who have

Hearing loss changes lives. I know this because without hearing loss, I’d be married to a completely different guy and my son would look very different – like a girl, maybe?  And I know this because of the secret vice that interfered with my marital selection process. My dark-and-dirty secret is that I’m a bluffer. Yup, I pretend to understand

It finally happened. The most significant, life-changing, tear-duct emptying, hallelujah-raising event in the life of parents finally arrived for the Hearing Husband and me. Yesterday, we delivered our baby boy, Joel, all 6 feet 5 inches of him, to university for the first time. On top of being both exciting (for the child) and emotional (for his parents), it was