My L&M has finally been fitted with hearing aids, he's sensitive about them as he thinks people will laugh at him when they see him. Only people with exceptional eyesight will be able to see them as they are very small and discrete.
He is finding them difficult at the moment.
He's constantly complaining that I'm shouting, 10 years of speaking loudly to make sure he hears me is a hard habit to break, then he takes the damn aids out and complains that I'm whispering!
He's complaining about the constant background noise, it's his bloody fish tank bubbling away!
He's complaining about the washing machine being too noisy!
He's complaining that all the food is to noisy when he chews!
He's complaining that his slippers are too noisy as he walks along the hall!
He's complaining that he can't hear when he's on the phone!
He's complaining if the TV volume is above 10 as it's too loud, unfortunately I can't hear the TV unless it's on 15, still he used to have the volume on 25!
I think there will be a new cause of death. Death by hearing aids, as I will shove them where the sun don't shine & no I don't mean his ears!
3 comments:
One of my closest friends has had hearing aids since he was 3, and from listening to him when he's had to get a new pair, I guess it's difficult to get them set up properly - it always seems to take him multiple trips to get them adjusted, and he knows what they should sound like! But they should be able to adjust them to help with background noise, so if that's still a problem after a few weeks, might be worth getting them adjusted? If anything, my friend has the opposite problem - he speaks too quietly in the car, for example, because his hearing aids filter out the road noise that the rest of us hear.
I love this and did you realise ears is an anagram of where you're going to shove those hearing aids. LOL
Mallowlark is right. as a hearing aid wearer since I was small, it does take time to get used to a change, its surprising the difference a hearing aid makes. You'd think a hearing aid just makes everything louder, right? Not the case. Deafness rarely is equally deaf across the whole sound spectrum - i.e. most deaf people will hear some sounds better than others (in me, its lower sounds, so i always hear men better than women, for example). The holy grail in hearing aids for the last 50 years has been to try to make hearing aids that are adaptable to the persons' specific hearing loss, rather than just upping the sound across the board - and with digital hearing aids they finally managed it.
Its still difficult though and will require a period of retraining for your L&M, and a period of patience for you, as you're learning! I think there are support groups out there - there certainly should be! i don't know if its worth finding one of those? even just one for you to meet the spouses of other hearing aid wearers and see what they've done to get through the situation you're in might help, as well as talking to someone who's been there.
good luck with it - if it makes him feel any better, mine are behind the ear with a red light on, so I look like terminator from behind at night...!!!
keth
xx
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