My dad refuses to wear his hearing aids. Every conversation ends up in a shouting match between two frustrated people. If they are uncomfortable, can’t he get them adjusted? He won’t even say why he doesn’t wear them (maybe he can’t hear me ask him!).
And he’s not the only hard-of-hearing person I know who refused to wear his hearing aids.
I love mine. More to the point, my family and friends love mine. Before I got them I found I was withdrawing from everyone simply because it was taking more and more effort to follow conversations (and Madame Pepperwinkle does love to talk). Since I got my hearing aids a little over a year ago, I’m much more sociable.
How about “please GET some hearing aids.”? My husband refuses to do so. The family treads the line between not being heard or understood and being accused of shouting.
My MiL refused to get hearing aids because she wouldn’t be around long enough to make it worthwhile. That was 30+ years ago. The SO will sometimes just hang up on her when she’s tired of shouting. We did buy her a phone with EXTREME VOLUME, which has helped.
OTOH, thanks to that, it only took 10+ years of nagging to get the SO to go have her hearing tested by actual real audiologists.
But she did get a real hearing aid and now she can actually hear! (She had been told by someone medical at some point that her hearing problems were sinus related and wouldn’t be helped by hearing aids. Fuckers. :mad:)
Hearing aids aren’t a panacea and don’t correct your hearing, like glasses for your ears. That’s not how it works. There are still big problems separating meaningful and meaningless noise, especially in group settings or places with background noise. And the less you use it, the less you are training your brain to understand it, the less useful it seems when you do use it. So there’s a vicious circle as well.
All that said, even if you do have realistic expectations, some people just refuse to accept how severe their loss is. They may admit they “don’t hear that great” but will deny they functionally cannot hear (a certain percentage are actually unaware of the extent to which they rely on lip reading). That’s tough because they usually won’t accept any mode of communication except speech. And they miss a lot, it’s frustrating for you and isolating for them.
Also, some people become accustomed to quietude and prefer it. I know my grandma told me when she got a new hearing aid, she turns it off when she’s out of the house, because the ambient noise of life (cars going by, dogs barking, etc) had become quite bothersome to her.
His ego wouldn’t allow it. Wearing a hearing aid would be an admittance of being old, and he’s still just a spry 90.
If he wore it, he wouldn’t be able to pretend to not hear us if he doesn’t want to do something.
It feels uncomfortable. Even though it’s fitted for his ear canal, he’s still not used to how it fits.
It amplifies noise as well as meaningful sound. He’s lost so much hearing that it’s not entirely possible to filter out all of the undesirable frequencies, because then the speech bands sound muffled.
There was a story on NPR just this morning. Basically, the reason why a lot of people don’t like them is because they solve part of the problem or the wrong problem entirely. The technology is much better now than it was, but the best ones are very expensive. I can’t link to the story because I’m posting from my phone, but it was on this morning’s Morning Edition.
We’re doing the hearing aid dance with my mom right now, too - “You guys all talk so quietly!” No, mom, we’re talking the same as we always have. You’re 71 - you’re not hearing as well. If she isn’t looking right at us, she doesn’t hear us. She has developed an irritating habit of nodding at everything we say, pretending to have heard us when we know she hasn’t. I’m not sure what her excuse for not getting hearing aids is - I think if she got them now, she’d do really well with them. She can still hear, but her hearing is definitely below average at this point.
While we’re on this topic, it baffles my mind how many people I encounter at my job who can’t function because they left their glasses at home/in the car. Were you not expecting to need to use your eyes today?
When I think of hearing problems this is the Dave Chappelle skit I always think of.
Yes, when you get hard of hearing get some darn aids and use them! Also, if you are getting slightly hard of hearing or know some who also is, for the love of God, quit trying to talk to them if they are in another room and/or are walking to another room. We can’t fracking hear you in here!
Same dynamic in our house. Dad is 90 and cannot hear much. He gets angry that we are mumbling behind his back (paranoia in play also). The TV has to be twice as loud as it should be, and he still complains about that.
I look forward to the day that a hearing aid will help me. I suffered profound hearing loss in one ear when I was 11. A couple of years ago, assuming that great advances have been made in hearing aid technology, and feeling ready to spend whatever needed spending to get a good hearing aid, I made an appointment with an audiologist at Mass Eye & Ear. He did a very thorough evaluation, and concluded that my variety of hearing loss would not be helped by a hearing aid. But in a few years, when my healthy ear loses some acuity due to normal aging, then I will be a good candidate for a hearing aid.
I’d love to wear a hearing aid, if one would help me.
My aunt got in this habit. She also had never been in a hospital in her life. She was even born at home. Then she had to go to the hospital. She was nervous and just fell back on smiling and nodding. The nurses and doctors thought she understood and scheduled whatever they had been talking about. Then the procedure would start and she’d be startled and terrified.
She had moved 500 miles away from her main family and was 200 miles away from me. So I basically had to go stay in her hospital room and do what my sister called English to English translation. The nurse or doctor would talk, and she would nod and they would nod, and then I’d lean over and yell straight in her ear, saying what they’d said. She’d frown and ask me to repeat and start asking questions, and very often say no, she didn’t want that.
I both talked to the nurses and put up signs saying you had to yell and that if she couldn’t repeat it back, she hadn’t heard it. Eventually, she told me that she did own a set of hearing aids that she didn’t like and didn’t use. But they were in her dresser drawer. I brought them in and they helped a little. It was hard to turn them up high enough to work without causing a feedback squeal.
That put her ahead of her husband, who didn’t have or want a set and was wheelchair bound. He had gotten used to not dealing with anyone while she took care of him. A good time was not had by all.
On one hand, she does want a hearing aid. On the other hand, it’s going to cost $3500, minimum.
Medicare and her supplemental health insurance do not cover hearing aids. She’s a widow, lives alone (with her blaring TV) on a small pension and social security. She won’t cash in a CD, as she’s saving those for “real emergencies”. So I offered to pay, and I thought we were all set. I gathered ads and phone numbers to start the process and gave them to her to look over.
Now, she says she won’t take my money because she won’t live long enough to really get any use out of the hearing aid. Impasse.
Uh-huh. Add a zero, for my husband’s. Which the VA paid for, thank goodness, but which he does not wear, confound him. He did wear them when they were shiny and new, but then a problem developed and it’s going on a year now he hasn’t gotten them fixed.
This weekend we finally had A Talk, he and I and our 8 year old who mumbles. (Yes, she really does mumble when she’s afraid the answer will be “no”, it’s not just him. But it doesn’t help him.) “You,” I told her, “have got to learn to speak up. And YOU,” I told him, “Are going to the audiology clinic this week and getting those hearing aids fixed and then you are going to wear them.” I just can’t stand another month of “Mumblemumble,” “I can’t HEAR you!”
We blame his hearing loss on 40 years of driving ambulance before they figured out the best place to put the siren wasn’t directly behind the driver’s head. Couldn’t possibly be his age, of course.
I can tell you that my dad’s hearing loss almost certainly contributed to his dementia. He chose isolation, loneliness, paranoia, and dementia over “looking old” when he refused to be tested or fitted for hearing aids. I’m pretty sure that if he’d known the consequences of his choice, he would have changed it.
Considering how much hearing loss baby boomers and younger generations experience because of exposure to loud noises like live rock concerts, we should all consider a hearing check essential for the preservation of our brains.
