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Hearing Assistive Technology - What do you find helpful?
Hearing Loss | Last Active: Aug 4, 2022 | Replies (56)Comment receiving replies
I too have unilateral hearing loss. Deaf in my right ear (always unaided) since birth and near normal hearing in my left ear, until my 20's. Was fit with my first hearing aid for my left ear in my late 30's and then 40 hit with a more noticeable drop on the left. My audiologist suggested a Phonak bicros system.
Traditional hearing aids send sound into the ear they are sitting on. With a CROS set up, the device on the non-hearing ear looks like a traditional hearing aid. But “it is really a microphone and transmitter and is picking up the sound to send it to the hearing aid on the better side.
It is not a perfect system but it does allow me to have a little localization. Conversations with one or two people are much easier to participate in. Large group conversations are still a challenge. Listening to music in the car as the driver is the best thing ever! lol - when I am a passenger, I often take out the receiver in my right ear and just use the hearing aid in my left to cut out the road noise.
My current system is almost 7 years old. I am exploring brands now to see what new features are available.
Cochlear implants are now available for single sided deafness, but I have not done much research on this.
Lisa
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Thank you for explaining the value of a bicross hearing aid. You mention that one ear is 'deaf' and also that the hearing in your left ear has deteriorated.
My hearing loss story mirrors yours a bit, but it started over 40 years ago so the technology was far less sophisticated. However, I was fit with a bicross system way back in the 1970s. Back then, it required a behind the head wire that attached the 2 units. No 'wireless stuff' then.
At that time I should have been convinced to have 2 hearing aids as both ears experienced moderate loss in testing. Over a few decades, because one ear was not getting sound like the other ear was, the unaided ear experienced 'auditory deprivation', something that can happen over time when an ear is not receiving or interpreting sound. By the time I tried a second hearing aid it did virtually nothing for me but amplify noise.
Years later, as I watched the development of cochlear implants, I was encouraged to consider getting a CI. I was fortunate that an audiologist friend I had met through HLAA convinced me to use the hearing aid that wasn't working with its telecoil technology plugged into a portable radio to try to reintroduce intelligible sound in that 'bad' ear. He said that I might be able to rehabilitate that 'bad' ear enough to make a CI work for me. I listened to a lot of audio tapes, children's books, etc. Slowly, that 'bad ear' started hearing more than it had for decades. Not perfect, but it was picking up some words.
When I decided to go the CI route, I asked the surgeons to implant that 'bad' ear. They would have preferred to do the better ear, but I won that battle. In 2005 I was implanted on the 'bad' ear side with the Freedom implant by Cochlear Americas. Within days after activation I was able to hear sounds I'd not heard for years. Within a few weeks, I was able to understand speech. Needless to say, the CI changed my life. The auditory nerve was able to get desired sound to my brain and my brain was able to interpret it. Yes, it took a bit of rehab. Today, I recognize sounds, voices, can listen to TV without captions (although I use them often), and am able to do well in noisy social settings when I use the add on technology that is available for my CI processor.
Having been told in my 20s that my auditory nerves were dying and that I'd be 'stone deaf' by the time I was 40, was absolutely wrong although it was probably 'right' then because cochlear implants were not on the radar yet.
A cochlear implant can reawaken your 'bad' ear as it did mine. If you have a CI evaluation, I encourage you to do it at a cochlear implant center.
Does your audiologist work with cochlear implants?