Better Hearing Consumer

Note from Gael:  I am pleased to welcome Dr. Sandra Vandenhoff as my guest author this week.  Her post on hearing loss and dementia contains links to a number of interesting articles and studies. Sandra is an audiologist with hearing loss, founder of HEARa, Hearing Strategies coach, speaker, and Canadian author.  She does not remember saying on her first day of wearing hearing aids: “Mom,

Are you hearing noises? In your head? That nobody else is hearing? Welcome to the tinnitus club. Actually, I’m not the official meet ‘n’ greeter of the club because I’m somewhat new myself.   While  you may have had discordant symphonies playing between your ears for a long time,  my head-noise switch has only recently flipped back on. What is

When trying to remember a time of not having hearing loss, I can’t. That’s beyond the edges of remembering.  But I can dream…   If I were a hearing person…. I would wake in the morning, and immediately connect With the sounds of house-life around me Husband breathing, cats playing, cell phone vibrating There would be no noiseless pause as

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