Streptomycin nerve damage.

[Imagining]

New here, hello all. My hearing problems started long ago after aggressive treatment for TB which left me with auditory nerve damage and a severe high tone deafness. I have managed my life very well considering and have constantly astonished audiologists at how much speech I understood. However now old age has caught up with me adding to my woes a normal decline in hearing so now socialising is impossible except with close family and even that is becoming increasingly more difficult. My frustration is with the NHS. The ENT doctor I have seen was very dismissive and abrupt, more or less told me there was nothing he could do and to get used to it. Hearing aids would not help so there was no point in giving me two. Also because of my age I was denied the top quality hearing aids which apparently are reserved for children, so I was fitted for a hearing aid in my best ear. I persevered wearing the thing as instructed but the background noises were unbearable as I have recruitment which makes loud noises very painful. I just wondered whether anyone else has experienced this dismissive, callous, attitude from the NHS? There has been no offer of further help, no follow up, no referral, no counseling. If anyone has managed to get better service and/or even help from another quarter please share it with me.

Streptomycin

[Enjoy]

I too am old and have used Aids for over 40 years. My old ones are not strong enough so new Aids are being supplied. I too have found the new ones are worse than the old ones as the background noise stops me hearing anyone speaking to me.

I go back in two weeks for new molds and hope some adjustment can be made to the Aids themselves to eliminate the background noise, which I do not have with my old Aids.

Please keep asking for a second, third or even fourth appointment. You may eventually be lucky but luck shouldn't come into it.

Try Social Services if you haven't spoken to them. Sounds an odd piece of advice but the one who saw me was brilliant. Helped all round.

A little p.s. I too had TB as a child in the 1940s.

[GRboyRiches in reply to Enjoy]

Hello, I can't say enjoy, because it's not fun, and with your Otoxic hearing loss, you probably have no significant High Tone sounds, so what ever you do you can't amplify then, if you can, you get a sizz or distortion, and because your Low |Sounds are better, this is where we hear "Background Noise", you need to seek out hearing aids with... Sound Compression... hearing aids that will take your high sounds which you can't hear and transfer them to a lower frequency of which you can hear.... lots of aids have this funcion , DO IT WORK....it's if you feel it does, some like some can't get there head around it, because your hearing the Highs at a Lower tone, but at least you hear them.. hope it helps

[Imagining in reply to GRboyRiches]

Thank you Enjoy, and GRboyRiches for your replies. To Enjoy, I contracted TB in my teens when working as a nurse on an open TB ward. The ward sister should have been thrown in jail for the way she ran that ward. She would not let us wear masks or protective clothing, (she said it upset the patients). We were given the most horrendous cleaning jobs emptying sputum mugs and bedpans. I had supposedly been Manteaux positive when I started nursing at this large 1,000 bed teaching hospital so they did not think it necessary to give me the BCG vaccination, - not even before I was allocated to the TB ward! I was sort of thrown to the lions as a young student nurse eager to please and do the "right" thing and for that I nearly lost my life and have been left with a lifelong disability. The matron of the hospital was very afraid my father was going to sue, but I was a shy, timid, sort of person then and did not want any fuss, I just wanted to be better and to get on with my life. I am a lot different now, I would have sued the pants off them for negligence.

To GRboyRiches, thank you for that information. I have never been told there were such hearing aids on the market. We lived in the USA for 30yrs and I frequently tried out new aids, the last one (digital) costing well over $6,000 but it was useless for me. The recruitment is bad and gives me severe pain when sounds I can hear normally are amplified. Could you give me the manufacturer's name of any of the hearing aids which convert high tones to a lower frequency so that I can find out more about them?

Thank you again to both of you.