When the equipment fails

In the autumn holiday I was in the unlucky situation that moisture had gotten into one of my hearing aids. Initially the consequence just was that the battery ran out. I therefor replaced the battery and removed all the moisture I could. It worked fine but 10 minutes later there were moisture in the electronic that regulates the volume. The consequence were that my hearing aid consistently tried add more volume on both hearing aids. When turning up for the volume on the hearing aids they say a beep sound whenever one step is added. When they hit the maximum volume they will say two different beep sounds. The result was that both of my hearing aids sounded like a fire truck because the volume button consistently sent a signal about adding more volume than what my devices could make.

First I tried to dry the hearing aid using a blow dryer but that did not work. I therefore put the hearing aid on a radiator. After a couple of hours the hearing aid worked again. But the waiting time where I only had sound on “my bad ear” was terrible. It reminded me about how important it is to hear with both of my ears and it reminded me about how bad my ability to discriminate sounds had gotten. When hearing with both ears it is to some extent possible to minimize a loss in hearing discrimination. I also experienced that I actually couldn’t hear more than one sound at a time. If there were more than one sound they sort of mixed up and almost sounded metalic.

The consequence was that I almost couldn’t hear speech if there was any kind of noise present. I for instance experienced at luch that the sound of cutlery, rattling plastic bags etc. made totally impossible to hear what another person was saying – even if they talked very clearly. I had to rely solely on lip reading.

The experience of a very different sounds that I couldn’t discriminate and the need for extreme concentration to understand speech almost made me feel dizzy – but I was not feel ill in any way.

When thinking about this experience in regards to my thoughts about getting Cochlear Implants (CI) it is very clear to me that I could bennefit from getting CI. The reason for this is that I know many people that only have CI on one ear, and they are hearing more that I can in a situation with one hearing aid.

I am looking very much forward to receive the opinion from the experts about if CI could be a solution for me. I am therefore very happy that I have now received a invitation to the audiology department at the university hospital in Odense. I am going there on november 1st 🙂

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