Hi, all. I'm new to the group but I have seen a lot of posts here that mention having a hearing aid but still can't hear in conversations whether they are private one-to-one meetings, in a lecture, or in a noisy restaurant.
Hearing loss, as told to my by my audiologist, damages the nerves. When you lose certain tones or frequencies, the can experience pain from the sound and/or lose the ability to distinguish consonants and vowels. I have both problems. The pain issues: I record the tones that hurt the most and then my audiologist can help tune my hearing aid so it would be less painful. And damage to certain frequencies causes you to not decide if someone said cat or that, sat or hat or cheese versus please. I have a big problem with word recognition and that makes me work harder to decipher what was said. I just can't hear in noisy places because the background noise adds more confusion to my brain.
Hearing aids can be adapted to help you hear in groups, private meetings, work environments, phone calls, dinner, movies and lectures in large rooms. You just have to be diligent in going back for tweaks on your hearing aids to make them work for you, not make you feel frustrated that they didn't work as expected. Lots of programming goes into the newer ones.
And some of the new aids don't require molds of the ear. They just have a little "sideways umbrella" tip that goes in the canal. There can be a tube to the aid or a wire depending on what you get. And cheap hearing aids, gadgets on infomercials are not worth what you pay for them. They don't have programming that can adapt to your everyday problems. My first hearing aid cost me $1,600 USD but there are some older models you can still get for less.
Keep bugging your ENT or audiologist until you are happy. It made me happy to hear the rain again, the sound a car makes driving on wet pavement, and music in stereo because I could hear on my right side again. It made me feel better about myself.
Good luck to all of you.
