calherewecome

Over the past few months, it has become clear that I have been experiencing hearing loss. It kind of has been sneaking up on me. It started with fights over the TV remote volume control. I kept turning the volume up. Paula kept wanting it turned down.

I tried turning on closed captioning, but on broadcast TV the captioning lag the speech by about 3-5 seconds which is really annoying. Captioning on DVD’s tends to sync rather well with the spoken word.

I also was trouble understanding speech at lodge and chapter meetings. Bad audio system didn’t help.

Listening to a person speak in a crowded room with a lot of background noise has become impossible.

So I finally made an appointment at Kaiser for audio test. It seems that the hearing test is just about the only thing that is free. I quickly found out that hearing aids are very expensive. (we are talking about thousands of dollars).

So the test revealed normal hearing for low frequencies and moderate to severe hearing loss for higher frequencies (2Khz and above). This explains why I could hear men speak and not women.

So I have made appointments for hearing aids at a place called “HEARx” which is a subsidiary of HEARusa. (Partly owned by Kaiser). I also found out the Costco is in the hearing aid business and costs significantly less than all the rest. So appointment made with Costco.

Here’s an article that I found in the NY Times on the issue. Interesting stuff. Hearing aid technology has come a long way. Most hearing aids now support Bluetooth. So you can directly connect to iPhones and the like.

More later after I meet with Hearx and Costco

This entry was posted on June 9, 2013 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Retirement, Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: hearing, hearing aids