#7

If you do not go the Costco route, find out if you are eligible for TruHearing, etc. These are 3rd parties who connect with local audiologists and provide a discounted fee/service for hearing aids.

You may even want to ask your current audiologist if they are affiliated with a 3rd party. They will not tell you upfront since they can charge you more.

#8

First, I wouldn’t worry too much about the experience of your MIL. May not be relevant to you at all.

For 1 and 2, hearing aids can slightly lower what it considers to be background noise (loud restaurants, for example), to give you a better chance of hearing close voices. It will definitely enrich your life! They (the pros) can set them up to boost soft sounds more than loud sounds. They don’t increase everything the same amount.

For 3, RITE or RIC (Receiver in the Canal) is the more modern version and two quick advantages are that the body of the hearing aid can be slightly smaller, since the speaker is in your ear, and not in the body of the hearing aid, and you can swap out the receiver ($100) if you need more power (I actually did that).

For 4, I wear glasses sometimes and I don’t have any problem, but my hair is very short. The glasses I wear have progressive lenses and a little magnetic clip-on sunglass part, so I don’t take off and put on throughout the day. Most of the time, though, I use multifocal contacts, which I love, being able to see in the distance and up close at the same time. Highly recommend the multifocal contacts.

It is common to have a trial period where you pay for the hearing aids and wear them and have all the periodic adjustments and then, if they are just not right, you can return them. Costco has a 180 day return period. Other dispensers have 30-90 day trial periods. So you don’t have to make a perfect choice up front. You can switch brands or models later once you see how it goes. BUT, your brain takes some time to adjust to all the new sounds, so what sounds terrible at first will sound very pleasant once your brain adjusts. So, some people go through the trial and it doesn’t sound perfect, so they return them and try another model. Then, things start to sound better just because the brain has adjusted, so the second one gets the credit for being better when it may have just been the brain that got better.

It is also common to think other people mumble, when you have hearing loss. If everyone else says they mumble, then maybe they do mumble.

#9

Do you use a McGraw-Hill text? If so there is a service they have called Connect, for online homework and tests. You can have complicated problems with whatever amount of help you want on the homework, and they grade it. :slight_smile:

I use it for an Intermediate Accounting course I teach. I put my comments on the Blackboard Grade Center.

#10

My hearing aids are RIC (receiver in canal). I wear glasses but take them off and put them back on several times a day with no problems. I don’t even think about the hearing aids when taking my glasses on and off.

Modern hearing aids reduce the volume of sounds that approach your discomfort level. As someone above said, the aids operate as an equalizer, increasing the volume of frequencies according to your loss, and decreasing the volume of over-loud sounds and background noise. A lot of conversation is at about 50 dB, but a lot of consonant sounds are around 35 dB. You can shout an “O” nice and loud, but you can’t shout a “th” sound. So even when people speak louder you’re missing a lot of the soft high-pitched consonants, especially in your left ear.

Hearing aids emphasize the frequencies involved in speech, which range from 250 Hz to 4000 Hz. A lot of birds and insects are above that range, so it’s important to tell your hearing aid fitter those things are important to you. Widex is a brand which is reputed to amplify frequencies up to 11,000 dB. I thought I would never hear a songbird again, but I hear them loud and clear now.

Nowadays hearing aids are water repellent, but you want to try to keep them dry. As one of the others said stick them in your pocket if you’re caught in the rain, or simply carry a water-repellent cap with you. For hiking, I think a do-rag would be a good choice; easy to stuff in a pocket. Several people here say they’ve accidentally stepped in the shower with their aids in with no harm done, but I don’t push my luck.

The higher-end hearing aids have strategies to help locate sounds. Your MIL probably doesn’t have that feature in her aids. If you go to Miracle Ear or a little storefront hearing aid store they will sell you what they’ve got regardless of what you actually need. I went to an audiologist affiliated with a teaching hospital who carries all the major brands and doesn’t work on commission. She had me trial some mid-priced Widex aids and I’m very pleased with them. If I were still working I’d have shopped for higher-end aids which suppress background noise and help with location of sounds.

Costco’s aids are major brands at a much lower cost than most sellers. But they don’t have aids with tinnitus maskers. Just wearing the aids suppresses my tinnitus a lot – a brief trial with aids should tell you whether that’s sufficient or whether you’ll need aids with a tinnitus suppression feature.

I suggest you contact your state’s workers compensation agency to see if you qualify for some financial assistance from them. I wore a hearing aid when I was teaching in my 20s which I got for free through workers comp. And maybe talk to your human relations person where you work to see if there’s other help available. You need to hear to do your job.

#11

Folks, the thing that amplifies loud sounds less than soft sounds is a compressor, not an equalizer. The equalizer is the thing that amplifies different frequencies differently (which is, of course, also part of a hearing aid).

Robysue, I think that chances are well that you will profit from a hearing aid. My tinnitus got louder, too, and is now much softer again because of wearing aids (and less hearing effort as a result of wearing aids).

One thing is a bit difficult with your loss. I think in english, a loss where you hear low and very high frequencies well, the mids bad, is called cookie-bite loss. So your loss is a reverse-cookie-bite loss, meaning that you hear lows not so well, highs bad, but mids well. This is a bit uncommon.

For high-frequ loss only, you could well go with an open fit (open domes or a very open custom mold). But it might be that you get better results with a custom mold which is not too open. A very open fit cannot amplify low frequencies. So be aware that your experience might not be that fantastic right from the start.

Good luck

Musician_72

#12

Okay, I stand corrected. But when trying to explain how hearing aids are more than simple amplifiers I’m betting more people understand equalizer than understand compressor.

Heck, the only compressor I’m aware of is the one in my garage that inflates my tires and runs my nail gun! :smiley:

#13

I stand corrected too!

#14

What is TruHearing???

You may even want to ask your current audiologist if they are affiliated with a 3rd party. They will not tell you upfront since they can charge you more.
Not sure what you mean by this. The audiologist is part of a group audiology practice that my PCP referred me to when I told him that the tinnitus had definitely changed in the last 6 months and that it was now constant (as in 24/7), primarily one sided (where it had been random), and the noise itself had changed from “cicadas” to “high pitched hissy noise”.

The audiologist group focuses on all kinds of hearing/speech disorders as well as routine fitting of hearing aids. I’ve been impressed with both the audiologists that I’ve seen there. The first one, who did the initial routine hearing screening, was the one who suggested that I be seen by the second one for the full tinnitus screening. I’m not real eager to switch audiologists given that second one has done a really fine job (so far) of explaining what’s going on with my hearing and tinnitus and has been (in my opinion) very good at listening to my concerns and worries. She’s also been honest about what hearing aids can and cannot do as near as I can tell.

#15

TruHearing is an online seller that contracts with a local audiologist to deliver and provide limited followup – typically 3 visit. After that you’re on you own.

#16

I am aware of this. However my MIL has run into many problems that seem to be common from what I’ve been able to read. The audiologist I saw did not dismiss my concerns based on my MIL’s experience outright, but she also did say that I may very well not have any of those problems—with the right set of aids. (On another note: Even before I started down this path, hubby and I have been concerned that my MIL’s aids may not actually be the best match for her needs. But they are what was sold to her a year or two ago before I had started to do any serious research into hearing aids myself. Had I known then what I know now, I might have been able to have steered her in a better direction.)

For 1 and 2, hearing aids can slightly lower what it considers to be background noise (loud restaurants, for example), to give you a better chance of hearing close voices. It will definitely enrich your life! They (the pros) can set them up to boost soft sounds more than loud sounds. They don’t increase everything the same amount.
I know that right now I’m not “hearing” correctly, but I do think I need to clarify what my frustrations are and are not.

  1. I don’t seem to have much problem following conversations in reasonably noisy restaurants right now. In general following speech in noisy environments is not a huge issue—except for talking to my husband and son. And I can’t always follow what they’re saying even when there is no background noise. They both mumble—that’s not just my opinion. They tell each other they mumble. My daughter says they mumble. My sister-in-law says they mumble. But I also know that I have morn problems understanding hubby and son than other people do.

  2. Really loud restaurants are unbearable not because I can’t hear the conversation of the people at the table around me; they’re unbearable because once the noise gets to a certain level, it triggers a migraine headache. In other words, loud sound (whether noise or music or whatever) has been a migraine trigger for me ever since I was a teenager. And my subjective definition of “too loud for comfort” seems to be much lower than most of the people I know: I’m always the first one to stick my fingers in my ears to block noise/music when it gets too loud. (I never liked concerts for this reason when I was younger.)

For 3, RITE or RIC (Receiver in the Canal) is the more modern version and two quick advantages are that the body of the hearing aid can be slightly smaller, since the speaker is in your ear, and not in the body of the hearing aid, and you can swap out the receiver ($100) if you need more power (I actually did that).
It’s good to know that some modularity is being designed into these systems.

For 4, I wear glasses sometimes and I don’t have any problem, but my hair is very short. The glasses I wear have progressive lenses and a little magnetic clip-on sunglass part, so I don’t take off and put on throughout the day. Most of the time, though, I use multifocal contacts, which I love, being able to see in the distance and up close at the same time. Highly recommend the multifocal contacts.
I have shoulder length hair that I don’t want to cut. And my glasses are switched maybe a dozen times a day or more. And that’s not likely to change. I tried progressive bifocals and while they were quite nice for driving and the occasional read something brief, they just were not comfortable for the long hours I spend on the computer at work or when I’m grading papers or reading for more than 10 minutes. There was just too much head movement.

It is common to have a trial period where you pay for the hearing aids and wear them and have all the periodic adjustments and then, if they are just not right, you can return them. Costco has a 180 day return period. Other dispensers have 30-90 day trial periods. So you don’t have to make a perfect choice up front. You can switch brands or models later once you see how it goes.
The audiologist’s group has a 75 day trial period. Not as good as Costco, but as I’ve said, I’m not sure I want to switch audiologists since the one I’m currently working with seems to be very good and I’ve already come to trust her.

BUT, your brain takes some time to adjust to all the new sounds, so what sounds terrible at first will sound very pleasant once your brain adjusts. So, some people go through the trial and it doesn’t sound perfect, so they return them and try another model. Then, things start to sound better just because the brain has adjusted, so the second one gets the credit for being better when it may have just been the brain that got better.
The audiologist has mentioned that it does take time for the brain to adjust. I’m not expecting

It is also common to think other people mumble, when you have hearing loss. If everyone else says they mumble, then maybe they do mumble.
As I said before, it’s only a few people who I seem to have real trouble understanding, but among them are my husband and son. Others do say they mumble a lot—including hubby saying son mumbles and son saying hubby mumbles. However, I have more trouble than most understanding them. As for other people I interact with on a daily basis? I don’t usually feel like people are mumbling around me. In a class with 25 students, I typically have trouble understanding 2-3 of them. But that’s enough to cause problems at times, particularly when one of the soft-spoken students is someone who also has a lot of questions in class.

#17

I’ve used MyMathLab from Pearson when I’m teaching out of a book they publish. It’s ok for routine homework, but I still have to grade the written stuff, including the tests. More important, however, most of what I teach is upper division math courses where the homework is focused on proof-writing. And that’s got to be graded by hand: Proofs are to upper division mathematics courses what essays/papers are to upper division history or literature courses. And the calculus book we use for our main calculus sequence is not published by one of the major publishing houses, so there’s no on-line homework support.

Blackboard, in my opinion, is a mixed bag. Yes, it’s easy enough to post things that don’t have heavy math content directly to Blackboard. But things with a lot of math? I still have to write them in LaTeX or TeX, convert to pdf, and post the pdf’s. That’s ok for notes or answer keys, but it doesn’t actually save me any time. The on-line quiz/test/poll stuff that Blackboard has does not work well in math classes. I’ve tried the math editor and it’s frustrating. It takes longer to try to get the dang poll set up in Blackboard than it takes to just write the thing, xerox it, and grade it in a traditional way.

#18

That’s good to hear.

Modern hearing aids reduce the volume of sounds that approach your discomfort level. As someone above said, the aids operate as an equalizer, increasing the volume of frequencies according to your loss, and decreasing the volume of over-loud sounds and background noise. A lot of conversation is at about 50 dB, but a lot of consonant sounds are around 35 dB. You can shout an “O” nice and loud, but you can’t shout a “th” sound. So even when people speak louder you’re missing a lot of the soft high-pitched consonants, especially in your left ear.
What I don’t want is for all the stuff that I currently can hear at 50dB to be amplified up to 70+ dB since I start to feel pain by 80-85dB–as in when the audiologist did the pure tone sounds at 80-85dB I was telling her, that’s beginning to get loud enough to feel like it’s triggering a migraine headache.

In other words, I don’t want to be overwhelmed by daily sounds that I can currently hear without aids (including most conversation), but which are amplified up to “just below” the level that triggers migraines in an effort to allow me to hear softer sounds that I can’t currently hear. I know that’s likely to mean that there will be some compromises in what the aids can and cannot do for me.

Nowadays hearing aids are water repellent, but you want to try to keep them dry. As one of the others said stick them in your pocket if you’re caught in the rain, or simply carry a water-repellent cap with you. For hiking, I think a do-rag would be a good choice; easy to stuff in a pocket. Several people here say they’ve accidentally stepped in the shower with their aids in with no harm done, but I don’t push my luck.
Good ideas for when I’m out and about with a jacket that has pockets. I’ll have to think about this when I’m just wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

The higher-end hearing aids have strategies to help locate sounds.
This is important to me. That’s one of the areas where I know that my current hearing losis affecting things. I find it very difficult to locate noises that are near my hearing threshold, and many of these noises are things that I feel like I should be able to do a better job of locating. And that’s also one thing I have noticed in the classroom: I can hear a student speaking (and understand what they’re saying), but I can’t always identify which student is speaking. And that can be frustrating.

Your MIL probably doesn’t have that feature in her aids. If you go to Miracle Ear or a little storefront hearing aid store they will sell you what they’ve got regardless of what you actually need.
My guess is that you are right. I know she didn’t get the cheapest thing that Miracle Ear sells, but I also know that she just would not bring herself to pay for a more expensive pair of aids either. At the time I though she was being penny-wise and pound-foolish, but you just can’t argue with my MIL.

I went to an audiologist affiliated with a teaching hospital who carries all the major brands and doesn’t work on commission. She had me trial some mid-priced Widex aids and I’m very pleased with them. If I were still working I’d have shopped for higher-end aids which suppress background noise and help with location of sounds.
The audiologist group I went to sells Phonak, Resound, Oticon, Siemens, and Unitron hearing aids. Don’t know if they work on commission or not. The audiologist told me that because I am working and that I am working in a classroom, that I really should not go too cheap. She said that I’d probably be ok with mid-priced aids, but that I’d also probably be happier in the long run with higher-end aids that help with location of sounds.

I suggest you contact your state’s workers compensation agency to see if you qualify for some financial assistance from them. I wore a hearing aid when I was teaching in my 20s which I got for free through workers comp. And maybe talk to your human relations person where you work to see if there’s other help available. You need to hear to do your job.
I’ll have to look into that. It hadn’t dawned on me. Thanks for suggesting this!

#19

Thanks for clarifying this. So ideally a hearing aid needs to have both: An equalizer to adjust how to amplify different frequencies based on your hearing loss pattern and a compressor to not over amplify the loud sounds that you can already hear. Am I saying that correctly?

Robysue, I think that chances are well that you will profit from a hearing aid. My tinnitus got louder, too, and is now much softer again because of wearing aids (and less hearing effort as a result of wearing aids).
I am cautiously optimistic that hearing aids will help. I am worried that if I don’t do this “right”, however, that I could become more frustrated, which in the long run, will make it even harder. So I’m taking the time to do the research that I need to do now to maximize the chances that I’ll get it “right”. And “right” does NOT mean “perfect”. “Right” means good enough where I can tell there’s a positive difference after a reasonable adjustment period and that I can get to the point where I don’t think about the hearing aids any more than I think about my glasses. Which is basically not at all unless the pair I need is “lost”.

One thing is a bit difficult with your loss. I think in english, a loss where you hear low and very high frequencies well, the mids bad, is called cookie-bite loss. So your loss is a reverse-cookie-bite loss, meaning that you hear lows not so well, highs bad, but mids well. This is a bit uncommon.
That’s good to know. Maybe that’s why I don’t seem to have too many problems understanding conversation even with background noise?

For high-frequ loss only, you could well go with an open fit (open domes or a very open custom mold). But it might be that you get better results with a custom mold which is not too open. A very open fit cannot amplify low frequencies. So be aware that your experience might not be that fantastic right from the start.
I’ll be sure to listen to the audiologist’s recommendations on this very carefully.

Also—is this something that could be worked out in the 75-day trial period? In other words, if I started with an open fit and was unhappy about because things seemed too-high pitched or not balanced, would I be able to move to a less closed interface or a custom mold without too much trouble or additional cost?

#20

I want to thank everybody who replied to this thread. You all have given me much to think about. I’ve written individual replies where I had further questions or felt the need to clarify something.

Again, thank you for all your kind help.

To give you an update on the time line:

I did call the audiologist’s office back yesterday to ask some questions about the whole process. Some of my biggest concerns were alleviated. In particular, the fact that there’s a 75-day trial period where if things just don’t work out, I can get a full refund is important. It makes this whole process seem a bit more “risk-free”. I was impressed that the audiologist called back to talk to me. I have scheduled the initial hearing aid evaluation appointment on July 8. (My vacation and her vacation won’t let it happen any earlier than that.) We had another nice chat about what I would like out of the hearing aids, along with more counseling on what aids can and cannot do, as well as the reiteration that while I am likely to benefit from a properly fitted pair of aids, that I will also have to be realistic in my expectations of what they can do as well as being patient during the adjustment period.

As someone who went through a disastrous experience with adjusting to CPAP for sleep apnea almost 6 years ago, I know all about the need to be patient. But I also know that being my own advocate and doing a lot of research before getting the PAP machine were critical steps in turning that disastrous experience into an ultimately positive thing for my health. I just hope that this won’t be as miserable of an experience. I already know it’s going to be a heck of a lot more expensive. And the whole hearing aid thing seems to be just as opaque for a newbie as the CPAP thing.

#21

I think you’ll find this easier than you thought. They’re not going to increase the volume of a sound if it’s a sound you already hear well.

Drug stores sell little plastic pill boxes for a couple bucks that are just the right size for my hearing aids. They’re flat and slip into a jeans pocket very neatly with lots of room to spare. But if you’re deliberately walking in the rain I bet you wear a hat, which is all the protection you need.

Your hearing loss is greater on your left, and that screws up the brain’s ability to locate sounds. The hearing aids will make your ears equal again, which is more than half the battle in my opinion. Higher-end aids have more than one microphone per aid, which adds to the location ability.

We haven’t mentioned whether you want your aids to connect with your iphone or bluetooth devices. Different brands have different strategies for doing that. I specifically told the audiologist I don’t want that, which helped keep the price down.

When I was deaf in one ear and had my current loss in my good ear, I started deliberately meeting friends in loud locations. They spoke much louder because the background noise bothered them. I couldn’t hear much of the background noise, so I could hear them well. In a quiet room they spoke so softly I couldn’t hear them at all.

#22

Hello Robysue,

yes, a hearing aid uses a compressor (usually even a multiband compressor, meaning that the compression doesn´t need to be the same for all frequencies) and an equalizer. Besides that, there is also directionality (modern aids use directional microphones to allow the aid to focus on the speaker in front of you, for instance) and some more digital signal processing (to reduce noise, for instance).

Yes, I also think that your reverse-cookie-bite loss might help in noisy situations. You don´t hear the low-frequency and highest frequency noise, but you hear the most important speech frequencies. But at home when it´s quiet, soft male voices will give you trouble, as you don´t hear the base frequency of their speech well, and you don´t hear the top end of the consonants either.

As for the possibility of trying out domes other than open domes I cannot tell you for sure as i use open domes and have always done so. I guess that custom molds will always cost something. But there are other options. Oticon has a “bass dome” with one or two vents, for instance, and there are other , more closed, non-custom domes, too. Personally I don´t like tulip domes as they tend to collapse in the ear and give very unpredictable results. Ask your audi about what kind of domes you need. I guess that during the trial most people use standard-domes and some of them get custom molds after the trial.

#23

This makes sense to me. And locating sound is a current issue for me, so it’s important that whatever aids I wind up with address that issue in some kind of fashion.

We haven’t mentioned whether you want your aids to connect with your iphone or bluetooth devices. Different brands have different strategies for doing that. I specifically told the audiologist I don’t want that, which helped keep the price down.
Connecting with an iPhone is a non-issue. I don’t own one and I’m not likely to buy one any time soon. My el cheapo TrackFone is a rather dumb smartphone that is slower than molasses, but it’s cheap. And I don’t spend much time talking on the phone anyway and I never have. It would be nice if the aids could act as wireless headphones for my Mac computer. My iPod is too old for any kind of bluetooth/wireless connections.

When I was deaf in one ear and had my current loss in my good ear, I started deliberately meeting friends in loud locations. They spoke much louder because the background noise bothered them. I couldn’t hear much of the background noise, so I could hear them well. In a quiet room they spoke so softly I couldn’t hear them at all.
Hubby sometimes speaks a bit louder in noisier environments, but it’s not consistent. It’s funny when I ask him to repeat things when we’re at home: Sometimes all he does is articulate the words better, and I can understand just fine. Sometimes he raises his voice, but fails to articulate and I tell him I still can’t understand what he’s saying, but that his voice is getting loud enough to cause my head to hurt. Usually he’ll then lower the loudness of his voice, but pay more attention to articulating the words.

#24

Yep. I’m aware there’s some really nifty mathematics involved in the digital processing of the sound. The math is pretty phenomenal, but it’s mainly from differential equations and related areas of analysis, whereas my own research has been in a very different area. The only stuff I know about fast Fourier transforms is stuff I’ve half-forgotten from the one time I taught a DiffEQ course a long, long time ago.

Yes, I also think that your reverse-cookie-bite loss might help in noisy situations. You don´t hear the low-frequency and highest frequency noise, but you hear the most important speech frequencies. But at home when it´s quiet, soft male voices will give you trouble, as you don´t hear the base frequency of their speech well, and you don´t hear the top end of the consonants either.
Thank you for pointing this out to me. It does help to explain why I have the difficulties I do with understanding hubby and son in our home and have fewer problems when we’re in public.

The audiologist did not mention “reverse-cookie-bite loss”. I’ve googled the phrase and I can see why you used it. My best hearing is in the middle, and in the middle it’s “near normal”—as in a very mild hearing loss in the middle, if I’m reading the audiogram correctly. The loss at the upper end is clearly well into the Moderate range (and even getting towards the upper end of moderate, if I’m reading charts correctly?) The loss at the lower end seems to be at the boundary of mild-to-moderate.

#25

I’d like to add, 8 hours of exposure to 85 dB noise will cause hearing loss. For that reason alone, the fitter is not going to allow the aid to increase volume to that point. And the reason they check for your level of discomfort is to make the aids work comfortably for you. So I would not worry about that. But when it’s time for the fitting, it’s good to remind the fitter that you don’t like loud.

#26

I do talk a fair amount on the cell phone and office phone using my hearing aid bluetooth device, and I wear out my smartphone doing text, email, internet, facebook, Yahtzee, Gin Rummy, Chess, music (mine, Pandora, XM Radio), etc. Another use for the Bluetooth capability is to get sounds from your desktop computer, laptop, and tablet directly into your hearing aids. I also have the TV transmitter. I love getting sounds from all my devices. Things are much clearer using bluetooth into both ears.