Hi aniha, let me mention up-front that I have only skimmed this thread, focussing mostly on your posts.
It seems to me that people got a bit hung up on you referring to your hearing aid as a BTE. However, you are not wrong to have called it a BTE, nor was your clinician. BTE just stands for behind the ear, which your hearing aids certainly are. While people often now think of a BTE as only a power hearing aid that connects to an earmold via a plastic tube, rather than a smaller hearing aid that connects to an earmold or dome via a wire, the industry has not always make this separation. On this forum, hearing aids with a wire, like yours, are often referred to as RICs (receiver in the canal), although you may also see RITE or RIE. But again, your clinician was not incorrect to call it a BTE.
For many people, a dome doesn’t fit perfectly in their ear and/or may not provide appropriate venting. The consequences of this are that they may not receive appropriate prescriptive gain at high frequencies, low frequencies, or both. Because a mold will often resolve this, molds will commonly, but not always, improve sound quality. If a dome happened to fit well in your ear, a mold may not make much difference.
Your hearing loss does not appear to require a UP receiver. You may find a mold made up with a HP receiver more discrete and comfortable.
Hearing aids need to be re-verified with real-ear measures to confirm that they are meeting prescriptive targets when you move from domes to molds. Because we don’t know whether your hearing aids are programmed optimally, or what your maximum word recognition is during testing, it is hard to say whether you are at a limit of what your hearing aids can do for you, or whether you should see someone for a second opinion. Your hearing loss as posted does not appear to be terribly severe, but if your speech clarity is very low, even at loud volumes, you may indeed be a cochlear implant candidate. What hearing difficulties are you having?
