I saw an MD/ENT today due to my own perceived hearing loss. Did a hearing test which included bone conduction and tympany I think (was not sure exactly what it was). He said he doesn’t think I will benefit from HA because my loss, such as it is, is mostly in the upper registers. But I sort of thought that is what happens to most people when they begin to experience hearing loss. However, compared to many people I am sure my hearing loss may seem minor. I have loaded my audiogram, but if for some reason it does not appear I will attempt to edit and reload.
I am having difficulty, for sure. I ask people to repeat themselves, use the closed captioning for streaming, I can’t hear tinny little lap top speakers anymore unless they are all the way up and there is no background noise, and if someone is not in the room with me, speaking in a normal register, I don’t understand them. I can generally understand day to day vocabulary, but if I am having a technical conversation or one that draws heavily on some kind of arcane language or subject matter I have to ask people to repeat themselves, when in the past I never did. Sometimes I have to ask people to spell words. On the other hand, I can hear noise around the house, traffic in the street and the sound of a neighbor’s lawn tractor or a chain saw a block away. I also have raging tinnitus in my left ear which I was hoping might be helped with an aid.
I asked him if the brain loses the ability to distinguish sounds it no longer hears and he said there is controversy about that. In his opinion, wearing aids early on was not going to help slow progression. But what about actual word/sound recognition? His advice was to get OTC aids which he says are tuned for higher registers and that should do the trick if I felt I needed something. Otherwise, ask people to speak up!
I was not looking forward to buying hearing aids, but I was looking forward to improving my hearing; however, now I am starting to feel like a hypochondriac. I had actually planned to look at some good aids but with this diagnosis am wondering whether I should just start with some OTC like the Bose or something, or not bother at all.