I have been hearing impaired since I was a child but I don’t know when exactly and why it happened.
I only had a hearing assessment done when I was 26 years old. Only then, I started to use hearing aids in both of my ears. It was after I had started to read about it and I learned that my case was not normal.
It’s not normal not to hear the phone ringing while it’s just a few inches from me. It’s not normal to mishear a lot of words. It’s not normal to be unable to differentiate between the B and P even if these letters didn’t exist in my native language.