Has she always been in a closed or a tulip dome? My first thought looking at her loss was that you’d have to close up the ear to get reasonable feedback management. But then I was flipping through a colleague’s work today and saw him get a very nice fit on someone with a similar loss with an open dome, so if she hasn’t tried an open dome she could. It’s going to depend on the ear.
That’s similar, right? Except bilateral.
But even with a nice fit to target, the patient is going from ~55% speech intelligibility index score to ~75% speech intelligibility, so it’s not going to be 100%.
That tinniness, that sharpness IS the clarity. The ear needs to re-learn how to interpret that and it will never sound like the good ear. The thing that’s tough with sudden loss is that with consistent wear it might get significantly better over time, but it might not and you don’t know until you do it, which means that you need to throw a pile of money at potentially nothing if a hearing aid never really becomes tolerable. PLUS, you need to go through a significant period of time where things sound pretty junky and you just have to muscle through. If you can find a place with a longer trial period and you trust the provider to fit the device well, she’s better off trying to commit to a solid month or two of consistent wear before she makes any assessments. Widex, Phonak and Signia all make good hearing aids.
Alternatively, a hearing aid just doesn’t work for her and she needs to adapt to a world with one good ear. A lot of people go through life with only one hearing ear (e.g. Halle Berry, Stephen Colbert, Robert Redford). You employ good communication strategies and you look for targetted solutions. One option for a technological solution for speech in noise would be a Roger On microphone and either a (sometimes cheaper) Audeo P30 with a Roger X installed, or a Roger Focus on the good ear. If money is no concern, you could pop an Audeo L90 on each ear and connect the Roger On to both and use that for TV streaming and speech in noise situations while also amplifying the bad ear.