Better Hearing Consumer

Dear Santa, First of all, may I say that you are looking spectacular these days – a little trimmer around the belly and – even better –  a trimmed moustache around the mouth. We’ve never met, you and I, but if that great event were to happen, it’s nice to know that I would be able ‘speechread you’ without interference from

The other day, I did a presentation of Sound Sense, the Hearing Foundation of Canada’s elementary noise-induced hearing loss educational program, to a class of Grade 4 students. During the fun session, we ask the 9 and 10 year-old kids about the noisy activities or really loud experiences in their lives. Some of the usual responses include irritating baby brothers

The Scene: In a salon, a woman sits down in a chair and removes the towel from her wet hair.  She puts her hearing aids back in and looks at herself in the mirror, chatting to the stylist.  Tell me honestly, do my hearing aids show? I mean, like a lot? I know I’ve always worn my hair long to cover my

If you’re a parent – what did you worry about when expecting your first child?  Probably the standards – will all the regular bits be in good working order, will it be healthy and maybe, as a bonus, will it be gorgeous, too? If you’re a hearing parent, you probably did not worry about your baby being born deaf. And

November is a month of events that inspire emotions – Remembrance Day (grief), American Thanksgiving (gratitude), the falling of the leaves (awe), and the release of the new Beaujolais (love). It’s also Movember, the innovative fundraising and awareness event about men’s health issues, specifically prostate and testicular cancer.  During Movember-in-November, men show their support by sprouting facial hair all over their upper lips

Do you know what really bugs me about being hard of hearing?   I simply detest the term hard of hearing. What does that mean, anyway? What do those words tell you about me, or the way I communicate? I need a better term  to describe myself, but the choice is limited: hard of hearing, a person with hearing loss, hearing-impaired, deaf

The house lights finally dimmed and the stage lights came up. The audience stopped talking and fidgeting, and our eyes burned holes on the stage, willing Alfie Boe to come out and start singing. (If you haven’t heard of him, I’m happy to wait while you take a moment to look him up.) I don’t normally ‘do’ concerts; my ears

If I lived alone, my house could be filled to the attic rafters with varmints and I might not know it. My house issn’t dirty, but I simply wouldn’t hear an animal going about its business. The critter would put the word out to his friends and soon it would be a wildlife open house. A zoo of raccoons, mice, birds and

This is a gushy, mushy love blog about captioning. Speech is a many-splendored and multi-faceted thing for the person with hearing loss who communicates through the spoken word. To understand speech, we must see it as well as hear it, observing speech on the speaker’s face or reading it in its written form. Captioning, or CART, is the exquisite real-time, verbatim

Does your hearing loss prevent you from traveling, worrying about potential problems on the trip?   Get over it – communication problems can happen anywhere – at home OR away.  Mind you, some situations are more challenging than others.  The following is my personal ultimate in bad ‘traveling-with-hearing-loss’ experiences, when I was 20 and living in northern Australia. In the dark hours