Hearing Aids

Every year I have to get my hearing tested, mostly because some of the antibiotics that I take can cause hearing loss. This used to not be a big deal until a couple years ago. The end of October of 2007 I got gentamycin toxicity. I have vestibular bilateral weakness, which affects the middle ear. I was dizzy for 2 months and couldn’t drive, I had to walk with a cane, and I had to do 6 weeks of therapy to learn to adjust to my balance problems. (not a fun time in my life…) At that time I had some hearing loss in both ears, but it wasn’t enough to need hearing aids. Even with therapy I still have some problems with my balance. However, I have learned what makes me dizzy and/or causes me to not be able to walk well and how to deal with it. I was supposed to get my hearing checked again in Nov. 2008, but we kept putting it off because our insurance had changed and we were going to have to go to someone who was in our insurance network.

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I was informed of potential hearing problems a long time ago and my doctor was often monitoring my dosage and levels to make sure that my body could handle the medicine. This was not my doctor’s fault. As can happen with anyone at anytime, the last time I used that particular medication my body decided that it could no longer handle it. So I can no longer have any amino-glycoside antibiotics. It does make it more of a challenge to find something that I’m not resistant to, but we make it work.

Anyway, I finally got my hearing checked in June and was told that I was “an excellent candidate for hearing aids”. Not too surprising, but a little hard to accept. I couldn’t tell you all of the details of my hearing loss except that I have loss in the upper frequencies, more on the left then right (so female voices are hard to hear and I have problems if there is a lot of background noise or if you’re in the kitchen trying to talk to me when I’m in the next room)…like I don’t know the percentage of loss I have in each ear. Curtis came to my appt. and saw the chart and he could explain it all to you in technical terms…but he is an engineer and finds it all very fascinating. (if you really want to know all the technical stuff, then you can ask him…I do love him for it though!)

We tried some hearing aids on in the office and tested how I did listening to the doctor and also to Curtis. They let me then take them home for several weeks to try them in some of my normal settings, to see if they helped at all. I was also trying to decide if I wanted to buy both, just one of them, or none at all. The seller for me to buy both was that I could hear my Grandma Myers on the phone and I understood my clients better. It was a very expensive investment (especially since our insurance covers 0% of hearing aids), but we made it work.

Despite the expense, they really are nice and fairly comfortable to wear. I have 4 different “channels” that I can use: 1-for normal everyday interactions, 2- crowd setting, where it filters out some of the background noise when I’m in a group setting, 3- church/theater setting, where it picks up the microphone and filters some of the background noise, and 4-telephone setting, obviously for use when I’m on the phone. I can also adjust the overall volume with my cell phone as a remote control, which is really nice! Since my hearing aids are digital, they can use the computer to adjust different frequencies and if my hearing loss worsens, they can adjust them accordingly. My hearing aids don’t fix all of my hearing loss…there are still some things that I have a hard time with, but it’s 95% better than before.

size of one hearing aid