I want to talk a little bit about how to get the most out of your hearing aids
and I'm going to use my personal experiences to illustrate some of what I
think are the key points. To do that I need to tell you a little bit about my
history, so I had no hearing in my left ear for the last 25 - 26 years and the
hearing loss in my right ear would be defined as severe to profound, which
basically means that unless the sound is very loud I can't actually hear it and
even there I only hear it at muffled sort of volumes. Around February 2017
I had a cochlear implant done to my left ear so I basically needed to teach
myself how to hear from that ear again and the way I did that was firstly
focusing on just very simple sounds such as the doorbell ringing, the microwave
beeping, indicators in the car, a clock ticking up on the wall and the
first time I heard some of those sounds I didn't quite know what I was hearing
and I needed to look around and try to find out what the source of the sound
was but the moment I made that connection it
was then suddenly easier to actually identify those sounds in future if I if
I ever heard them again. So it's really a case there of you know practice and
perseverance to try to be able to get a grasp of what I was hearing there.
Obviously understanding speech is a lot more difficult than being able to hear
the sound of a doorbell, so what I did there was I tried to make the activity
as enjoyable for me as I possibly could to take some of the chore out of
the fact that I was doing hearing rehabilitation. So what I did there was
take my all-time favorite novel which is Stephen King's IT. I've read the book
somewhere in the vicinity of 20 or 30 times and it is quite a big thick book
so that's you know quite an achievement in itself 'Yay for me!!' so I've
got an audio book version of this novel and also a printed version which I
loaded onto my Kindle reader and I would listen to the audiobook version through
the implant alone so I actually had the hearing aid turned off, I didn't
want my better ear to to cheat and
while I was listening to the dialogue through the implant
I was following along with the printed text in my ebook reader and it was hard
I mean at first it was hard and what I was hearing seemed you know meaningless
there was absolutely no connection between the printed version and what
I was actually hearing. Occasionally I'd pick up on a word here or there in the
first couple of chapters I think what other main characters name is Bill which
is a nice short easy name so I remember picking up on that name early on
but it was really again just a case of practice and perseverance.
Following along with the text helped a lot because it gave me a
context of what I was supposed to be hearing which then made it a lot easier
to then recognize "Okay well that's what that's what that sound was" and just
through you know listening to page after page after page of dialogue
the connections became easier and easier. So where I would previously
understand maybe one word, one word then followed on into two words and then
I would be able to understand a sentence and then I worked my way up to
understanding a paragraph and then I got to a point that I could understand maybe
a page or two of text just listening to the dialogue alone and not having to
refer to the printed copy and if I did get lost I would refer back to the
printed version of the book to get myself back on track again and over
time I found that I was able to lengthen the periods that I could look away from
the printed version and listen only via what I was hearing through the implant.
The other thing I did was practice listening to the voice that I would be
most familiar with which was my own so when I was leading up to having the
cochlear implant surgery and definitely afterwards I kept a YouTube journal
documenting you know my experiences up until that point and what I would do is
after I've made the video later on in a day I'd actually watch it back again
and listen to myself talking so being able to see obviously my lips move in
the video made a lot easier and again it was really the case of making that
connection what I expected to hear and what I did
actually hear and at first again it was a bit of a challenge because it was
almost like there was this language that I knew I was hearing and I couldn't
quite get a grasp of the actual sharpness of the words
and being able to get clarity of the words but again just through perseverance I found
that you know it became easier and easier. The other thing I did once I
then had to return back to work was utilizing the time that I spent on the
train going to and from work to practice listening to speech in what would be
more of a challenging situation so again I would turn the hearing aid off and
basically I closed my eyes and just listened to the sounds around me just
through the cochlear implant alone and more or less try to eavesdrop in on
conversations that were happening around me. Now that was a bit of a challenge
again because not only was there the conversation I was trying
to make sense of but there are also other conversations happening at the
same time and there was the sound of the train and the sound of the doors opening
and people moving past so that was more of a challenge but again same message
persistence, perseverance and certainly a lot of patience paid off
over time and I've got to the point that the level of speech
understanding from my left ear is actually at a point that it's
certainly very beneficial and it picks up a lot of what I'm missing through the
right ear. So how can you use these sort of techniques with your hearing aids
because obviously hearing aids work very differently than cochlear implants and I
guess the same message is there. It's really just a case of you know listen
and practice hearing those simple sounds first so if you've never worn
hearing aids before and you've just been fitted with them chances are your
hearing loss has been there for quite a period of time and that's the sneaky
thing about hearing loss is that it does literally sneak up on you so by the time
you actually notice or somebody tells you that you're not hearing so well your
hearing loss may have actually been there for the last
five or sometimes even ten years so you've had this
progressively deteriorating hearing over that period of time and all
of a sudden your pop hearing aids in and there's a little bit like you've been
sitting in a dark room for all that period and somebody shines a flashlight
in your eyes it's bright and at first impressions it's going to
seem like you're staring directly into the Sun but as you get
used to the intensity of that light you realize 'Hey look you know it's just a
regular old flashlight" and that's exactly what you need to do when wearing
hearing aids so at first it will seem like you've got superhuman hearing and
you're picking up on the sound of you scratching your head
and your feet .. uhh.. your shoes as you're walking, the
sound of taps dripping ... all those sounds there and at first that can
seem like it's overwhelming but I like to think that the brain is at this point a
little bit confused because it's hearing all these sounds it hasn't heard for
quite some time and it's almost like it needs to mentally file all these
everyday sounds away in a little cabinet in your brain that it calls
"Needless Background Noise" so sounds that you do want to hear them but you don't
want the brain to react to them in the same way that it would if it heard the
sound of a glass breaking or a car honking its horn
or somebody screaming. So that takes time and it's really just a case
of just using the hearing aids at the times when you're less under
pressure to actually try to understand what somebody's saying. So a lot of times
people tell me that they only wear the hearing aids when they're going out or
when they're going to work or a really challenging situation and they
don't we really wear them at home because. I think well I don't really need
to worry about you know understanding what people are saying so I give myself
a break. I tend to think that wearing ... certainly in the initial stages ....
wearing the hearing aids when you are at home and you're not under pressure to
understand what people are saying to you is the best time
because it's giving yourself time to acclimatize to what
every day sounds sound like, what your voice sounds like through the hearing aids,
what the sound of you turning pages sounds like through the hearing aids, what
the sound of your feet on the tiles in your house sounds
like. If you can get used to those sounds now, later when you get into these more
challenging situations all those... all those sounds that would
otherwise distract you aren't going to do so and you can then focus on hearing
what you want to hear. The other thing to keep in mind is that hearing aids are
just that .. I mean the name in itself implies exactly what they are. They are
hearing aids, they're not hearing cures. There is no cure for hearing loss at
this point hearing aids certainly do not cure
hearing loss they won't give you back the hearing that you had when you were say
20 or so years old. So what you really need to use there is the other tools
which you are at your disposal which believe it or not are basic
communication skills and some of the things that I know when I was growing up
were instilled to me as being parts of just common courtesy ....
facing a person while you're speaking, don't look away, don't talk into
your hand that sort of thing because being able to get those visual cues for
when you're speaking to people can then help for you to pick up on the things
that you may not necessarily be able to through your hearing alone. So certainly
people need to be facing you directly if they need to get your attention rather
than calling you from another room it's going to help a great deal if they can
actually get your attention via some other way so whether it be that they
actually make visual contact with you so you can actually see them or or tap on
the shoulder if you're not directly facing them something so then you know
that somebody is trying to get your attention and then you can focus on them
and things are going to be a lot easier ... and you really need to speak up as well
if somebody's doing something that makes it hard for you you need to
let them know because you can't expect people to understand what it's like to
have a hearing loss unless you give them that understanding. The other key thing I
really think that you need to do is get an understanding of just the basics of
how your hearing aids work so a lot of hearing aids have
a little ... whether it might be a volume dial or a volume switch or something
similar and to understand the situations when it's actually beneficial for you to
maybe crank the volume up a little bit or alternatively the situations when it
might be beneficial for you to actually lower the volume a little bit
raising the volume isn't going to help you hear one person speaking in a
noisy environment and that's the type of thing that you need to basically learn
just by experimenting so if you are in a situation that you find difficult try
adjusting the volume to see if that makes any difference
sometimes you might actually find that simply you altering your positions are
trying to put the sound that you don't want to hear behind you for example and
limiting the amount of sound that you do want to hear to in front of you is going
to make more of a difference then trying to fiddle around with a volume
switch. The other thing that you may need to look into is if there are specialized
programs within your hearing aids so some hearing aids have programs which
are designed for listening to music, some hearing aids have programs
which are designed for listening to speech in a noisy environment, some
hearing aids ... well most hearing aids actually ... have a program in there called telecoil
now telecoil can be useful for if you're .. in .. your place of
worship or at a train station or an airport or if you're in a cinema or a
theater watching a show .. there's certain designated areas where they have
a loop installed and that loop basically .. a very simplistic way of putting it .. that
loop basically enables your hearing aids to act as a remote speaker for the
venue that .. that you're actually at so you'll actually get what's called
a better signal-to-noise ratio, so signal being what you want to hear and noise
being what you don't want to hear.. so being able to get more of that sound
that you want to hear is just going to mean that you're going to understand it better
and all that really just comes down to just understanding the basics of how
your hearing aid works and what situations hearing aids can give you a
lot of benefit in what situations hearing aids can give you not maybe as
much benefit you may then need to you know employ
some other methods of trying to understand better. So if you have for
example ... your favorite restaurant that you like to go to and it
gets really crowded and there's a lot of noise there and you find you don't like
to go there anymore because you can't understand, what you maybe .. perhaps need
to do is .. go a little perhaps a little bit earlier in the day when it's
not so crowded, maybe see whether there's a seat which is in a section of the
restaurant which is not as noisy, perhaps there might be a seat
which is better well-lit which makes it easier for you to lip-read the person
that you're dining with and pick up other visual cues so don't rely solely
upon the hearing aids .. the hearing aids are just a tool.. they're certainly not
going to be the ... the "be all that ends all" cure for hearing loss because
that's just not the way it works. One way to look at it is somebody who for
example has mobility problems, maybe they've had an accident and they need to walk
with a walking stick. The walking stick is there, it will certainly help them
walk, it will make it a bit easier for them to walk but it's not going to give
them the same ability back in their legs that they had before they needed
the walking stick. In the same way somebody who was walking with a walking
stick and had the choice between taking .... a long flight of steps
or an elevator is obviously going to choose the elevator because they
physically ..... although they could probably negotiate those steps given time... it's
actually more of a challenge for them and the easiest solution for them is
actually them to take the Lift and you need to think of the same thing with
your hearing as well so if there's a situation that is going to be a
challenge for you you need to try to find a way to make that easier. So that's
all I've got for today in terms of how to make the most of your hearing aids. I
hope you found this information useful. I'd love to hear your thoughts, so please
leave me a comment
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