Hearing Loss and Travel

The truth is, although those words go together just fine in a blog post title, hearing loss and travel do not make the best traveling companions.

My husband and I have just returned from a little road trip where we spent quite a few hours driving (car noise ! road noise!), we checked into a few hotels and we ate in restaurants. Any one of these situations is a known problem for people with hearing loss, but you combine all three into 5 days and nights and you might understand why I was happy to walk into my quiet home. We actually had a wonderful time, focused mostly on tracing some of my maternal family’s roots, but it required a bit of advanced planning and a heavy dose of flexibility and acceptance in order to fully enjoy the experience.

Taking one piece at a time – car and road noise. My husband has lived with me long enough to know that in a car, he needs to direct his verbalizations towards me. This works especially well when I do the driving, which I do much of the time. When he drives, I bring along my RogerON, a small microphone, which I can attach to him so that his voice, even if he looks away, goes directly into my hearing aids via Bluetooth. Every hearing aid manufacturer makes its own proprietary version of these microphones, which can be very useful in this situation. I highly recommend them for this and many similar situations.

Hotel check-in desks — I am a normally assertive and self-confident person, but when it comes time to check into a hotel, I revert to the mousy-wimpy version of myself. I simply cannot understand the words of the hotel professionals behind the desk, either speaking too fast, too quietly, or with poor diction where the words all run together in to one breathless paragraph., so I dutifully stand there, mute. I miss hearing the list of hotel amenities and have to depend on my husband for the information. Now to be honest, this situation best describes my experience before I received my cochlear implant, so now I do much better in this situation. But for most people with hearing loss, I know they share that experience. All hotel desks should have hearing loops built into their counters so that you and I can switch our hearing devices to the telecoil program and instantly hear every word. The good news, here in Eugene- Springfield, is that grants obtained by Travel Lane County, and later Travel Oregon, have provided the funds to install hearing loops in dozens and dozens of hotels in the area and throughout the state. This is astonishingly good news. Make sure your hearing aids have telecoils, and are activated, so you can take advantage of this amenity.

Restaurants —- Even people with normal hearing complain about the noise in most restaurants, so this is the situation that requires flexibility and acceptance. Accept that it will be noisy and be flexible enough to sit where you can hear best, even if it is not your first choice.

The key to traveling comfortably with hearing loss is to prepare for the things you can affect and be flexible and accepting of the rest.