Better Days in a Life with Hearing Aids
April 13, 2025
Better Days in a Life with Hearing Aids
A confession regarding my hearing aids: I forget I have them, forget I wear them. I go about my day and run out of charge before my hearing aids do. I’ve learned how to maximize what hearing I still have, and mostly, I can hear… until I can’t.
Many days, as I surface from sleep and am starting to stir, my husband brings me coffee if he’s up before me. He knows I can't hear so he doesn't talk.
Before he starts a conversation, he’ll gesture, are your ears in? Whereas, I’ll spurt out a thought, or some sort of question, without hesitating to consider, “Will I be able to hear the response?”
I am lucky. I’m the one who forgets.
He’s not so lucky.
But I grab my hearing aids belatedly, put them in and sheepishly say, “Sorry…. again?”
I am forming an alliance with my hearing aids: with them I’m better off. Yeah, there are features that bug me - functionality design that really could be better. But the money is spent; the trial period is passed. So I’m learning to get along with them. It’s not without effort, but it’s effort that’s rewarded. The alternative is too isolating.
A fully functioning ear is constantly converting all the sound around us into electric signals that indicate pitch, volume, and tone quality of every element: Speech, music, rattles, hums, every sonic bit is identified by the brain. When the ear is compromised, the correlating brain activity is redirected to interpret other sources of input such as the visual, the tactile. As the auditory nerve is stimulated less, listening skill diminishes. I generally wear my hearing aids every waking hour so my brain gets exercise processing sound.
I avoid noise wherever possible. Unfortunately, avoiding noise means passing up a lot of live music, which can be too loud to take in and mostly doesn’t sound right, with or without hearing aids, and there’s nothing I can do about that. It’s disorienting. It used to be that, whether in the studio or at a show, listening to live music was not just entertainment, it was an all-in engagement that mapped my world.
For a long time, the absence of being able to experience music as it is being made constrained any impulse to make music myself. Then, a few years ago, an infection of my vocal cords compromised my ability to hold a pitch, and that further stifled the impulse. Now the throat is healing, and it’s mainly rust that challenges the practice of making music.
Now it feels like my ears are perking up. Likely the regular auditory stimulation that my hearing aids provide, combined with deliberate ventures with AirPod Pros or carefully adjusted headphones, find me diving into things I’d been missing:
Listening to music and daring to make sound.
Gathering with acquaintances who keep me in the loop.
Connecting with a loose network of neighbors who are my “ear to the ground.”
Walking and talking with a friend who walks on my left side, because I hear better out of my left ear…
And there are other things that help:
Captions on the movie lighten the listening load.
And reading or a solo walk in nature can be a restorative break.
I’m learning about balance and pacing, and it feels like I’m getting traction. I am not Sisyphus, and I don’t have to be. The return of music is exhilarating, energizing. I am grateful for a nurturing community and evolving technology, and —outside of the dastardly political realm anyway— I’m learning the power of acceptance.