Welcome Jim, this is a great place to learn from others even though you already have lots of experience with hearing loss. And good luck with your retirement. I retired in 2000 - and again in 2013 because I didn't get it right the first time. Don't do that to yourself.

Quote from Contentandwell "For me, it was the loss of word recognition that made things the most difficult." That makes a huge difference. Same goes for listening in noise. There seem to be many ways to state or describe the inability to understand speech. Audiograms predict (to a degree) how a person can hear sound, but they are less good at predicting how that will be understood by a hearing impaired individual. Some Audiologists now recognize that many veterans (especially those who have encountered blasts or TBI, traumatic brain injuries) have less ability to understand speech than their audiograms would suggest. So there is obviously more science yet to be understood in auditory precessing.