Thanks. So do you think I am asking too much to be able to hear my colleagues and students wearing masks? Even when Im standing right next to them I cant understand them. I have trialled each brand for the time they would allow me - widex 4 weeks, otican 6 weeks, beltone 4 weeks and now the phonak, which seems a bit better. I think they all have frequency lowering. Does it make a difference that it was 4 different HAs?
Today at work I have spent literally 90% of my day not understanding what was being said.
I still cant understand why you believe I will be able to program when audiologists couldnt.
Which aids have you worn before all these trial aids? How well did you hear with those aids?
I donāt think any of us are pushing you into self programming. This is the DIY forum, we talk about it here. Most of us had bad experiences with audiologists that could not fit aids so we learned how to self program.
If you donāt want to talk about DIY maybe you should start a new thread in the other part of the forum. Lots of help there.
The audiologists canāt hear what you hear, remember only you and you alone know what you can understand and āhearā when using HAs, so this is why DIY could be a solution for you to try, sure you need to have a basic understanding of how to program, but its not hard to do.
Thereās plenty of posts about the subject, just use the search tool from right here on hearingtracker to find the answers you need.
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My loss is different from yours, Dawn, but it slopes from workable low/mid to deaf in the highs. Even with what I think is a great HA program, I absolutely struggle with speech of mask wearers compared to when I could lip read them. I feel bad that you were stressed to tears. My solution, which may or may not be helpful to you, was to change some of my expectations of understanding spoken language and to switch to visual assists: captions, real time live transcription of speech via free mobile phone apps, InnoCaption for phone calls (I donāt think that one is in Spain) and others. Iām happy to provide detail if you think it would help.
I donāt think my colleagues at work fully understand the impact of masks, itās brutal. They need to change speech patterns and that is very hard for people to remember.
The one speech comprehension-related advantage I found beyond hearing aids alone is the Roger pen, which helps but doesnāt solve speech comprehension as my progressive loss deepens. Youāre in my thoughts!
Late to the forum but I just wanted to ask, why do you say Widex are not for the DIYer?
Iām a musician and recordist and have been working EQ settings for recording and live mixing for 40 years. I realize Widex has terrible software for programming, but thatās what Iāve got and I plan to do some changes on my hearing aids to eliminate way too much 7k.
Hi Dawn , so sorry to hear about your hearing loss and problems with Audis! Have you now found any solutions? If so what are they! Your loss @ speech mid frequencies particularly in one ear seems very severe so comprehension will be poor and if you use frequency lowering it will need to end up in a fairly low frequency area which is still not terrible! Oticon for this is not as good as Phonak! I live in Turkiye where most audis are awful and trials of more than a few days are impossible so I have had nothing but frustration for the past 3-4 yrs! Tried Oticon self programming and sometimes slightly better but far from a really good result! Good Luck & Best Wishes from Turkiye!