Sue Says Series – How Treating Hearing Loss Can Lead to A Better Life

If you are visiting this website, you are likely to have some relationship with hearing loss, affecting either you, a friend or a family member.  You no doubt know that hearing loss creates significant challenges to relationships, in social discourse, and while participating in cultural, athletic and entertainment events.  It affects your whole life.  Embracing this change is hard, as it carries stigmas that our culture has yet to defeat.

Is there anything positive about hearing loss?  Yes….but only if you treat it as soon as it is discovered.

I have severe hearing loss, on the verge of profound.  Both my grandmother and my mother had severe hearing loss.  At age 49, when I began to notice my own diminishing ability to hear in normal conversations, I took my first step to assess my situation.  By age 51, I was wearing hearing aids in both ears, and now 27 years later, I am on my 6^th pair of hearing aids and am preparing for a cochlear implant later this fall.

My journey with hearing loss has become somewhat of a fourth career, as I have become passionate about bringing hearing loss to the attention of our civic leaders, institutions and the general public.  Wearing hearing aids, if you need them, is as important as taking heart medication if you have heart disease, or insulin if you have diabetes.  It changes your world.  They really DO help, but only if they are consistently worn – every day- so that your brain adapts to hearing sounds that it has not heard for some time.  It is tempting at first to wear them only “when you need them”.  Well,…you need them all of the time.  Proven research today shows a high correlation between untreated hearing loss and dementia.  I don’t know about you, but I would rather wear hearing aids than have dementia.

The good news – besides that it may help prevent dementia – is that advancing technology not only makes better hearing aids, but also offers a wide range of compatible equipment to increase the effectiveness of the devices in other areas of your life.  Hearing aids can be linked to smartphones,   to TV connectors (so you don’t have to blast the TV sound in order to hear/understand), and small mini-mics (for use in many situations such as book groups, exercise classes, etc.) If you are not a fan of more complicated technology, there is a simple way to get those same benefits simply by pushing a button on your hearing aids.

Besides your audiologists, who are the true professionals to help you on your hearing journey, there is a growing body of people in our community who are here to support you in adjusting to this change in your life.  We want you to hear better in every part of your life, now and into the future.

Sue Prichard
Co-Chair, Loop Lane County  Committee
The John G.  Shedd Institute for the Arts