I’ve been to the ENT a couple times now for my ear problems, and as the allergy meds she gave me have helped some but my right ear still feels kind of funny and I’m starting to realize maybe I don’t hear so good out of it even on the meds, I have a hearing test scheduled. I was just wondering what I should expect.
Is it like when I was a kid and you had to raise your hand when you heard something in one ear, or are we talking about something more involved here? Is it all whether I can hear stuff, or is is like the eye doctor’s where some of it is what line you can read and some of it is them looking into your eyes with lights and stuff?
We do it bi-yearly at the factory I work at. Its a mobile unit that drives around and you go into these sound proofed booths and put on some head phones.
You hit a button everytime you hear a noise in what particular ear and so forth.
As it happens, I just had a hearing test as part of a screening physical for a job I’m applying for.
They put me in a little soundproof booth with a pair of headphones on. In my hand was a device with a pushbutton on it. A tone would play in the headset, and I would push the button when I heard it. The tones were a variety of high, low, and progressively softer.
I used to get them once a year at my job, though they’ve been lax the last few.
Basically you are placed in an isolated both of some sort with a pair of headphones and asked to respond in some fashion ( often pressing buttons ) as you hear tones going off in each ear. With our tester it is an escalating and descending series of beeeeee noises. That’s about it. Results are generally pretty instantaneous and if you have a baseline ( I do from 1990 when they first started running these on me ) you can chart how much you’ve lost over time. If you don’t it will still give you an idea how you stack up compared to most folks.
So essentially it’s the same kind of test I had as a kid every year in school. I’m just worried that they ARE going to find something and that I’ll be like my grandma and always maneuvering myself to put my “good” ear towards people (and my “bad” ear towards boring people who can’t make good dinner conversation.) She’s always been like that - had some kind of childhood fever, long before she started to lose hearing in her other ear. Now she has some kind of fungus up in there too.
I mean, I’m only 28. I feel way too young to be all “WHAT? WHAT WAS THAT? YOU HAVE TO SPEAK UP! WHY DOES EVERYBODY MUMBLE!”
Well, everybody does mumble. I hear that with both ears.
Well, it fits well with the librarian trope. I hope you also have glasses, wear knitted shawls and cultivate a severe, no-fun-of-any-sort-allowed demeanor :D.
Yeah, the test itself is no big deal, unless you’re severely claustrophobic. I had my hearing checked 5-6 years ago I think it was and what they turned up was a tiny little deficit in the high-middle frequencies and a surprising ability to hear abnormally high frequencies. The technician described me as having “bat hearing.”
My rock-and-roll deafness kicked in when I was…maybe 15? It’s been downhill ever since. I blame myself. And all those cheap-seats tickets right by the speakers.
That’s me. Hearing went in 1 ear about 8 years ago. Now I walk on the right side of any person/group I’m with, and I sit at the far right in meetings at work.
One additional test they did with me, beyond just the beeeps, they wanted to know if sounds was conducted (through the bones?), they hooked up something that touched the skull behind the bad ear and also touched the forehead (if I remember correctly), then they vibrated one side and measured to see how much was transmitted. Don’t remember what it told them, mostly because the hearing is so completely 100% gone in that ear that it didn’t seem to matter.
Oooh, it’s a bone conduction device. It measures the baseline hearing by dumping sound straight into your skull. If you have good hearing via the bone-phone but bad hearing via the regular headphones, then it implies that something is wrong with your eardrums or the cilia. It’s used to differentiate between kinds of hearing loss so that the correct treatment can be applied. Eardrums can be patched or replaced, I think… cilia don’t grow back… and I don’t know what you do if the problem is further in. Perhaps a cochlear implant?
I just sent home our babysitter, who is doing her doctorate in audiology on the topic of bone conduction hearing aids. If I’d seen this a moment sooner, I’d have her sit down and answer all your questions. She is the sister of another Doper, so perhaps she’ll pop in.
There’s also the spondee test which is basicly the Say The Word test. The audi reads off a list of words and you have to repeat them.
Hey…not all of us hoh folks are old people. Matter of fact, I’m your age and I’ve worn aids since I was three. It’s actually a myth that most hoh (hard of hearing) people are old people. I think like over 1.2 are under 64 (offical "senoir citizen age) and there are plenty of teens and kids who wear aids.
Heck…think of it as an oppertunity to gain an new superpower…When someone says something that you don’t want to deal with, just turn your hearing aid off on them! (and yes, I’ve always been notorious for that…how’d you guess?) You can also get a REALLY cool colored hearing aid with incredibily cool earmolds. They aren’t your grandma’s hearing aid…lol.
the bone anchored HAs or the ones with the headband? I have a bone conduction loss (no ear canals, and no eardrums, a condition known as atresia) so I’m a little more familiar with bone conducntion devices then the average person on the street. I wear BTEs thou.
(and yes, I’ve always been notorious for that…how’d you guess?) You can also get a REALLY cool colored hearing aid with incredibily cool earmolds. They aren’t your grandma’s hearing aid…lol.