I Can't Hear You

photo from wiseGEEK.com

My wife Barbara and I both wear hearing aids. Her hearing is critical, mine is marginal. She has struggled with her hearing for many years. There is a myth that hearing loss is a senior's fate. Although seniors do suffer hearing loss, it is not we're told due primarily to aging but to other hearing problems although accentuated more among seniors.

Various agencies are involved with aging with promising discoveries even although they don't always agree which is understandable. For instance, one states that out of 315 million Americans, 17% (53 million) report some degree of hearing loss. Another reports 48 million. Then, there are those with a hearing loss who won't admit it; others have hearing aids but don't use them; hearing loss occurs among children as well as adults and some are born deaf.

One study states that 32% of those aged forty to forty-nine and another 32% fifty to fifty-nine or 64% total have a hearing loss before reaching sixty. Another study reveals that 19.5% of teens have at least a slight hearing loss and some of those are serious. Only a few Americans seventy and over develop a hearing loss with women twice as likely as men to do so.

Ironically, our culture has moved from a noisy industrial society to a quieter information-based society only to be blessed by innovative hearing aids yet cursed by harmful amplification. Hearing loss is too often hidden rather than admitted. Even though it can be a natural deterioration and not provoked, it is one of the maladies of life that evokes denial rather than seeking help. Even then, costly hearing aids often lie in seclusion despite their remedial potential.

Even for those with implants or hearing devices, perfection is evasive. Normal hearing is a phenomenal macrocosm and most difficult to equal much less surpass. Even so, considerable improvements have been made but too often underutilized or disregarded. Cochlear implants are a modern miracle (invention) but utilized by only a few. They do work well with children born deaf more than with adults with later onset.
Hearing difficulties take an enormous toll all too often unlike other maladies afflicting many of us because of their expense, maintenance, appearance, stigma, nuisance and incremental improvements. Admitting the loss of hearing can be most beneficial rather than hiding it and keeping up with the research new advances can be beneficial even though a nuisance for some.

Katherine Bouton*, a longtime victim of deafness, makes sense on How to Talk to People with Hearing Loss:

1. Don't shout, listen.
2. Look at the person you are talking to because they read body language.
3. Don't repeat yourself. Rather, rephrase it.
4. Don't give up.
5. Avoid noisy places.
6. Make sure you have their full attention.

*Katherne Bouton's Shouting Won't Help Why I—and 50 Million Other Americans—Can't Hear You.