For those of you who have read my introduction post and my story "Suddenly Silence", you know that I am legally deaf. I have a 90 decibel loss in each ear, which is quite significant. To put that in perspective, it means that if someone were shouting at the top of their lungs, I would not hear that they were making a noise unless they were less than 4 feet away from me. Even then, I would have literally no idea what they were saying.
As you can imagine, having such a drastic hearing loss happen overnight was very stressful for me. A few months and many medical tests later, I was finally able to start trying to see if a hearing aid could help me. I was very excited about this and did quite a bit of research about hearing aids. I know some people will having trouble understanding anyone being excited about a hearing aid, but trust me after months of only being able to communicate with people using email, instant messaging, texting, and even post-it notes, I was ecstatic about the prospect of hearing again.
My hearing loss fell into the severe to profound range, with profound being the most dramatic loss. In that range, only top of the line hearing aids with powerful receivers are likely to be of assistance. Because my left ear had such a dramatic loss, it was unable to use a hearing aid at all.
The problem with this is that having hearing from two sides is what allows you to establish the directional property of sounds. Hearing only on one side makes it difficult, or even impossible, in many situations to tell where a sound is coming from. In some cases this is just an annoyance, but in other cases, it can be dangerous. For example, if you are walking in a parking lot and hear honking horns and squealing tires, unless you see something happening, you will not be able to tell where it is coming from. Having to take that extra few seconds to look around for the source of the sound can mean the difference between getting out of the way, or being roadkill.
The two hearing aids that I narrowed it down to were the Siemens Binax, which claimed to be the latest and greatest technology, the top of the line Starky, and the Widex Dream 440. My audiologist had other plans and tried to sell me a cheaper hearing aid that was not as technologically advanced (Phonax) for a premium price. After a week of hearing all sounds so loud that they made me feel nauseous and still not being able to hold a decent conversation, I returned the hearing aid and demanded she allow me to trial the one I had picked out. When the audiologist refused, I took my business elsewhere - even though she charged me an outrageous $375 "trial fee".
Eventually I found an audiologist willing to let me try the Siemen's Binax, although she seemed skeptical after looking at my hearing test results. Initially, I was pleased because I could kind of hear and things certainly sounded better than with the last hearing aid; however, there were some problems. For one thing, I had previously enjoyed listening to music, but with this hearing aid female singers sounded like they had a bad sore throat and male singers sounded like Kermit the frog. The music itself was unpleasant as I could not hear the entire pieces of the sounds and it had a kid banging on pots and pans discordant feel to it.
One of the worst things though was that at work, there was a guy that sat in the cubicle behind mine who had horrible allergies or was always sick. When he would cough, for some reason, this hearing aid made it sound like a harmonica. The first time it happened, I nearly bolted out of my chair in surprise and alarm. Eventually, I learned to accept this strange sound and not freak out.
Then one day, I heard a lady speaking. I peered over the walls of my cube trying to see if someone was speaking to me or close-by, but there was no one there. I stood up and asked my harmonica-coughing co-worker if he heard a lady speaking. He gave me a confused look like you would give to someone who might be crazy and pointed down to the end of the room where our co-worker Valerie was speaking on the phone wearing a headset and walking around.
The trouble was that the lady I was hearing was not Valerie. I sat down at my desk and removed my hearing aid and the lady went away. I put it back in and there she was. There was a lady in my hearing aid! My mind started swirling and for a minute I thought I really had gone crazy.
Finally, I figured out that somehow, the hearing aid, which had blue-tooth was picking up the frequency of the wireless headset that my coworker was using and the lady in my hearing aid was the person she was speaking to. I told this to the audiologist and she claimed that it was impossible, but it did happen. I ended up returning the hearing aid for several reasons and ultimately ended up purchasing a Widex Dream 440, which actually made me forget I was deaf at times. No more lady in my hearing aid and I was actually able to enjoy music again thanks to the wonderful advances in technology.