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Advice, getting used to hearing aid, cookie bite

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Hello everyone, I’m new, thanks for welcoming me to the group. I have had a cookie bite since I was born. 8 years ago I bought my first hearing aid, Phonak, I didn’t have a good experience. I had a forest of sounds in my head, everything was louder, but I still couldn’t understand the speech better. After a year of wearing it, I gave up. I could no longer cope with them or without them. I got used to my natural hearing/lack of hearing again. Now I decided to try again. I work in a school with small children, over time it becomes more difficult for me to concentrate on understanding speech. I have the Bernafon Zerena minirite 9 on trial. Delighted with the natural sound and noise control, it’s comfortable to wear and listen to. With speech understanding, I did not feel a significant difference for the better, so they adjusted my device a little. After the adjustment, I understand the speech worse. They tell me that sometimes it takes half a year for the brain to get used to it and for the device to be helpful. I am confused, is there any chance that the device can be adjusted better? Or a way to get used to the device? Do you have any advice on getting used to a new hearing aid? With regards to my , is there anyone else with something similar that has been able to function better with the devices? I don’t want to spend again lot of money and than not to use it. Sorry for the long post. It is more difficult for me to express myself in English because it is not my native language. I will be grateful for any advice and opinion…

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@user294 I found that i got use to my hearing aids and the way things sounded by slowly increasing the amount of time i wore my hearing aids each day over a number of weeks. It took awhile for me to get use to wearing them and the way things sound try them out in different situations and try and see how speech sounds in different environments and tell your audiologist and they will be able to make adjustments based on what you say

It can be counterproductive to 2nd guess your audiologist, so be careful. You have to work together. However, losses such as ours–I have a bit of reverse cookie bite loss–are often not handled well by the standard fitting algorithms. Sometimes the best fits are counterintuitive. Do some research in the area.

Well you should talk to your audiologist about where you are struggling. Speech comprehension is not a strong area where hearing aids shine. Especially in a noisy environment which I assume you are dealing with when talking to children. I don’t see your speech comprehension scores but the lower the scores the less help aids will provide. Possibly your audiologist can set up different programs on your aids that you can switch to for the environments where you struggle. But remember, aids don’t fix anything, they try to help. But knowing your speech scores gives us a better idea with what you’re dealing with.

This is my speech comprehension

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I’m learning a lot from this forum, and I’m thankful for any advice. My is almost the same like before 8 years, and this is greate, but speech understanding was 100% at 50db, and now is at 60db. I’m 43 year old, i supposed that getting older I have less patience to concentrate to speech understanding. I just want to hear better on my workplace, in school, in other situation I can handle without aids, for now.

I have less patience to concentrate to speech understanding. What does that mean. I don’t want to sound rude but this is your problem. No one else’s. If you’re having problems then you have to learn to deal with it. Focus on a person’s lips for starters. This is not an area where I shine. But 100 percent speach comprehension at 60 dbs would have me popping open a dozen bottles of champagne. Unless I’m wrong.

I appreciate your opinion. I know my problem is negligible compared to the problems of the majority on this forum. The classroom is not a quiet room like in the audio test. Some small children often put their hands over their mouths when they are talking, when they are unsure they speak more quietly, they mumble, they put their hads down and when I ask them to repeat their uncertainty is even greater. That’s why I’m trying to fix my deficiency, which is not very big but exists, with a hearing aid.

Again I’m not ignoring your problem but don’t have an answer. You’re dealing with children and the behavior you describe is all part of the deal. Maybe someone with more knowledge can help you.

I have a reverse cookie loss which is also hard to fit. If the manufacturer’s default prescription isn’t working you could try nal-nl2 which I found to be a huge improvement.

Whatever the prescription you use, you may need to decrease the suggested gain in the upper and lower frequencies otherwise background noises could drown out speech.

Another thing to consider is using music mode in the classroom. Personally, I prefer as little compression / processing as possible in general and especially around children.

Thanks, your tips will be helpful for my next appointment with my audiologist. And I will try music mode in class.

In reply to @user294

@user294 said:

I know my problem is negligible compared to the problems of the majority on this forum.

Beg to disagree. That’s a beast of a hearing loss you have and classrooms are horrific listening situations.

Reverse slopes can be tricky; there’s more individual variation in this population as to what will work compared to a more traditional sloping loss. You’ll want to find a patient, experienced fitter and you may also need to be patient. But I would hesitate to recommend to any patient that they keep a set of hearing aids that are not benefitting them.

On the classroom side, are there things you can implement to improve noise and acoustics? With infection control policies, it’s difficult to add a lot of soft surfaces, but can you add more cork-boards, hush-ups to chair legs, close doors and windows, have machinery serviced. Can you arrange the students in the classroom into a formation that is more beneficial, getting them closer to moving the soft-spoken ones up? We always do systems from teacher to student, but students to teacher is much harder–you’d be looking at either training the kids to talk into pass-around microphones, or seating them in groups and networking a bunch of table microphones in each group that the kids would not be allowed to touch.

My fitter has no experience with the cookie bit, but she is open to everything, she has a great desire to help me.
I use some adaptations/behaviors for better hearing in the classroom, but I didn’t remember to “soften” the surfaces, great idea and advice! Thanks Neville

In reply to @Neville

@Neville said:

We always do FM systems from teacher to student, but students to teacher is much harder–you’d be looking at either training the kids to talk into pass-around microphones, or seating them in groups and networking a bunch of table microphones in each group that the kids would not be allowed to touch.

This reminds me of the first room with video-teleconference built into it with which I had experience. There were microphones hanging from the ceiling scattered around the room to help pick up those in the room to send their voices to the other end(s) of the vtc session.

I’ve seen it done well, and lousy also. But always expensive. Something like that could be done to send audio from your students to your ears.

I sure hope you come up with something effective!

WH

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