@judyca7 Way to go Judy! As a budding advocate, interested in enhancing your advocacy activity (:-), it would be helpful for you to know what your audie's thinking was in not making a point of mentioning this to you earlier. I would phrase such a question to the audie along those lines. (That might enlighten your future talks with hospital staff! 🙂 ) As far as your poor hearing goes, I hope there's a certain positive in that...i.e. if it's really bad, then you are a candidate for much better hearing, via the CI (which is what happened with me). I hope one of the super experienced here will comment on this last sentence if anything I said seems to need correction.)

I'll be interested to hear how you like the remote mike when you get it. Also, which one did you order? As I've said before, my cochlear implant was a miracle for me. Not perfect, but so very much better. We are lucky to living in times when these incredible solutions exist. When my hearing loss was diagnosed in 1963, I was told that there would NEVER be any help for my progressive hearing loss. I was a college junior then. It bothers me that people we trust with our hearing issues don't always share this kind of information with us.

@judyca7 You mentioned that your audiologist let you demo a remote mic. I believe ALL major brand hearing aids have a remote mic option. It typically costs about $250 (some remote mics have telecoils so the price may be higher). The AVERAGE cost of a pair of hearing aids is about $4700 and can go up to about $7000. They probably didn't mention a remote mic because of the shock of the cost. In my opinion, the remote mic should come with the hearing aids because of the benefits. As I've mentioned in the past, a remote mic ties you into that manufacturers brand of hearing aid. If you decide to go with a different brand in the future, you'll need to buy their brand of remote mic. Also, there is a universal solution if you have a telecoil. That would be an FM system with the receiver connected to a neck loop. FM's are pricey though. I have a telecoil but wanted the convenience of a remote mic. I wear two Resound's and purchased the remote mic about a year afterwards. It turned out to be a good thing though. Recently, I wanted to buy the Resound TV Streamer device since my wife doesn't need the TV as loud as I need it. (BTW, an FM system could also be used for this application, which offsets the price of the FM system. One device for both applications). As with the remote mic, the TV Streamer is tied to that brand of hearing aids. To get back to my point of a remote mic even though I have telecoils, I found the Resound TV Streamer on eBay. It costs $85 as opposed to the $250 that the audiologist would have charged. The device worked but it may have been because I already had a remote mic program in my hearing aids. I did not have to see the audiologist to set it up. The TV streamer used the program that was set up for my remote mic.
Tony in Michigan