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I found this on the web and found it so true

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The Gap I Wanted to Close

It’s hard to understand what hearing loss is like, even if you research it or work with patients all day. It’s hard to understand even if you live with someone who has it. Hearing loss is invisible, and so much of the experience — the listening fatigue, the mental gymnastics of filling in missed sounds, the sting of “never mind” — happens where no one else can see it.

So I told them. I explained that for us, hearing and understanding speech is the task — not something that happens in the background. I described the flood of emotions that comes with hearing loss — frustration, embarrassment, shame — and how those emotions often shape whether we succeed or struggle. I shared my experiences with my father, and my children, and the MindShift that changed my life. The talk included clips from We Hear You so they could hear these truths from other voices, too.

And then I told them the most important thing: their work matters more than they may realize.

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I agree with the author (btw, can you share the source for this writing?).

I’ve always said something similar - prior to my hearing loss (a lot of it), hearing was like breathing. It was passive; hearing just happened without having to think about it. Now, it’s almost always an active experience where I’m paying attention to context, physical and verbal cues, the rhythms of conversation. I’m a strong performer, thanks to lots practice and determined , but have made my peace that few hearing peers will understand the effort that makes the magic happen now.

It must be 25 or so years ago when programs like “Dragon naturally speaking” first appeared professing to input your spoken voice to a text program on your computer

Reading the results gave a perfect demonstration of the difficulties hard of hearing people have in making sense of the spoken word!

My hearing loss is and has always been speech understanding. Without my aids I hear a lot of things, I can actually know that people are talking but can’t understand what they sre saying. In my 21 years wearing aids I have had 10 sets of aids. My audiologists have tried everything possible to help me. I am wearing Phonak Spheres i90 at this time. I am understanding speech almost perfectly, well 90% anyway. I also have the Oticon INTENT1 aids and they are great but I cannot understand speech in noisy environments with the INTENT1 aids. With my Spheres I can hear very well in noisy environments.

@cvkemp

Hi chuck!

I like your active—passive description.

What’s the tv program that Vanna flips letters?

For me speech recognition is like that….except all the letters are blank. By the end of the day I’m exhausted and cranky.

(Back to back hearing instrument specialist two days running. Yesterday they showed me dummy hearing aids of the next hearing aids they are proposing for me. GN Resolve ??? IA behind the ear hearing aids. )

DaveL

@DaveL of course I am retired but I use to get very tired and frustrated just setting in the Sunday morning church services, then Monday morning men’s Bible study. But I have to be honest I haven’t noticed the tired feelings since I gave gotten use to my Spheres. And since getting them updated I have even noticed being less tired. I have even noticed my blood pressure is down.

My wife has lived with my steadily declining hearing for twenty years, but it wasn’t until I took her to a tune up my new Spheres in January of last year, that my wife finally realized what it’s like for me. The audi played a series of sounds through the terminal for her, first as normal, and then as I hear them without aids. She was shocked. Everyone should experience that if they have family who have progressive hearing loss.

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