#1

Hello all-So glad I found this forum.
I have an appointment this Sat. at Costco .
if anyone would share some helpful ideas or hints I would appreciate it.

#2

Be patient. Pay attention to times they work well for you, and times they don’t. Make follow up visits for tweaking. Don’t feel shy about going back to ask them for more adjustments. And don’t be shy about returning them in 12 weeks if they aren’t working out for you.

#3

Hint: Hearing aids will make you hear better, but they won’t make people speak better. I work with a horrible mix of bad speech habits and widely varied volume speakers. People who mumble, speak to you while waking or facing away, speak to you from another room, whisper or try to talk so low that no one else can hear what they say, speak while covering their mouth, etc. are still going to be a huge challenge, no matter what hearing aids you have. Turning up the volume for those habitually poor speakers will leave you scrambling for the mute button when the loud talking country girl walks in the room!! :-0

Your life is about to get much nicer, and you may hear sounds you haven’t heard since you were much younger, but they won’t make you HEAR like you did way back then. What you currently hear may sound DIFFERENT, because it will have added treble or bass tones that you are missing.

So, expect to hear BETTER, but don’t set your expectations too high. Hearing aids are only as good as the people tuning them, and since they don’t hear what your ears are hearing, it’s quite a frustrating journey with lots of trial and error tuning. Be patient!

In a perfect world, we could all “Tune” our hearing aids with our cell phones or laptops, which would allow us to fine tune them in our own environments, while listening, rather than trying to communicate our needs to someone who is essentially a blind painter trying to create a masterpiece.

Your hearing aids will be tuned to your hearing test results, and that’s your base line, but it may take many visits with your audiologist to better tweak them for your “real world” needs. Give yourself a couple of weeks to adjust to the new sounds, and As someone already said, make notes of your hearing challenges and carry those to your audi. He/she will then adjust what frequencies he thinks your challenges are coming from, and hopefully you’ll have a great experience.

Best of luck, and congrats on being able to hear better!

#4

Greghahn-thanks-good suggestions

#5

Moccasin-thank you for responding.
I’m so excited and need to remember my hearing will be better but not like it was as a younger person.
I’ll keep going back and keep notes.

— Updated —

Moccasin-thank you for responding.
I’m so excited and need to remember my hearing will be better but not like it was as a younger person.
I’ll keep going back and keep notes.

#6

Why did this response post twice?

#7

You need to hit Go Advanced instead of Post Quick Reply then click on submit and it will only post once. The site has been messed up since they did an upgrade about a year ago and it has never been fixed.

#8

Thank you very much-I now know why people keep posting things twice😘

#9

About how long-general estimate- how long does it take to get aids adjusted and used to hearing aids ?

#10

It varies by individual. It will take at least 30 days to get used to the aids. It may take up to 6 months. The number of adjustments depends on you and your audi. Some users will get the initial adjustment, a follow-up in two weeks and never return. Others may require multiple trips to the audiologist before they find the ideal settings. The length of adjustment may be driven by the degree of hearing loss. A mild hearing loss with a good word recognition score will mean less adaptation than someone with severe hearing loss and a poor word recognition score.

#11

Your ears and brain are about to embark on a new journey. One that can be very tiring. First, you will have to adapt to the feeling of having something in your ears, and at the same time, your brain will have to adapt to a much busier audio world.

Your audi will likely advise you to give your ears and brain a rest several times a day, until they both become ‘addicted’ to having the hearing aids.

I don’t think we’re ever “done” with adjustments, as our world is constantly changing as well as perhaps our own hearing ability. For me, it’s mainly a game of compromise. I’ll make several trips to my audi when I want something changed, and we’ll either eventually hit the nail on the head or I’ll get tired of the appointments and trips and just live with it for a while.

Tweaking voice isn’t too big of a problem, but tweaking extra stuff like blue tooth telephone streaming and music can be quite frustrating getting the tones just right. I read a lot about the multiple programs that other people use for restaurants, background noises, music, focused zones and such, but I’m not patient enough to tweak that many different programs! I have my base program, which is set to my hearing tests with a 20% background reduction, and a “crank it up” program which brings up everything so I can hear soft talkers quickly without turning my volume up, and a “Mute” program so I can give my ears a rest without turning the aids on and off.