Hi All,
Just an update now that I’m 3 months down the track. I have been on holidays the last 4 weeks, mainly spending time at home, and wear8ng my aids only when I go out, so I’m a bit rusty on opinions, but here we go.
Wearing the aids has become fairly routine now. As you know, work has been my priority, and there it has helped greatly. About 2 months in I accidentally forgot them one day and boy, did I come to realsie just what a differnece they had made. I went from a world where I didn’t think about my hearing much anymore, to suddenly going back to listening with my head in a garbage bin. That was a bad day, and made me realise just how bad my hearing is and that I didn’t fully appreciate the difference they could make before I got them.
Now, having said how wonderful they are, even for my mild loss, here’s the caveats.
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Noisy restaurants and parties are still a problem. While better, trying to listen to an individual in a crowded room is still difficult.
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While most of the time I forget I have them in, there are still days they itch and drive me crazy and nothing much seems to make it stop. There’s also no pattern. Next day they can be fine again with no obvious changes.
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I am also still having to poke them back in regularly as they slide out. As a matter of fact, one day at home I wasn’t wearing my aids, but I still found myself sticking my finger in my ear, trying to push them back in! Seems I’ve developed a habit
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Bluetooth with more than one device is annoyingly annoying. Keeping the connection, swapping between devices, and just working consistently doesn’t happen. If only ever 1 device, it works fine, but it’s a puzzzle game of switching things on and off when I move between my office phone, my mobile phone, my iPad and my car.
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The most curious thing of the lot. As mentioned previously, I have a bluetooth device on my office phone, which connects to my aids through the Oticon ConnectClip. Took me a couple weeks to work this one out, but would you believe, when I blow my nose, it makes my phone ring? It’s true, I kid you not.
The MDA220 device makes a ringing sound in my aids, and a green “call” light lights up on it when a phone call comes in. That also happens when I blow my nose. But not only when I blow my nose. Any sudden loud noise will cause the same behaviour. There seems ot be some feedback loop from I assume the ConnectClip mic being overdriven, and that signal back to the MDA220 somehow triggers and incoming call response. No idea how, but it does.
- Finally, sometimes the boosted background noises can just end up being too much. My work airconditioner is constant background white noise which sometimes still drives me crazy. Lucky the hearing aides mute function restore blissful ignorance when it’s just too much, but I can’t use it too often as I’m never completely alone for that long. Some other environments can be similarly annoying sometimes (road noise when deiving for example), but the office air conditioner is there every day. I wonder if this is my only mistake in going for the base Opn model. Maybe the better noise reduction on the upper models would have helped better hear, but I’ve made my choice for many years now, so I’ll have to live with it.
Overall, I’m happy with my aids. I’ll continue to work on the comfort features, but I’ve had no real need to visit my audiologist again, when I am surprised with, and basically use the one main setting on the Opn for everything, unless I just feel like playing around.
So there you have it. Bar any unforseen issues arriving, I don’t think Ikll have much more to report here, but may pop by occasionally for. Quick progress report. Hope this has been helpful to some others entering the aorld of Hearing Aids.