When did you first know you were going to need hearing aids?

Great story! I have a very similar hearing loss to yours, but I still do not hear crickets, I need to get on to my audi to get that fixed!

The first clue was a hearing screening I took in middle school in 1979:

I don’t recall having functional issues with HL at the time, though I do remember the same screenings in 10th grade being carried out in two buses (no “quiet rooms” needed?) parked behind our high school gym, and that I was sent over to the “short bus” to finish my screening.

I’d say I started noticing some difficulty understanding speech with my wife and the TV around four years ago, and more so in the last two years. I finally did something about it this year, with a little encouragement from the Mimi Hearing Test app and the Apple AirPods Pro 2 in Transparency mode.

I’ve had it since birth, my parents discovered when I was 3 years old that I often throw stones and bang and that the noise doesn’t bother me, so they took me to the polyclinic for hearing loss, where they found that I can’t hear, and then I started going to that polyclinic that has a Kindergarten together with children who cannot hear well. I went there until the seventh year, apart from learning to listen and speak, we also learned to count, write and read what is done in primary school, so I had some kind of advantage when I started going to school.

I knew I was having trouble understanding soft-spoken people at work and that I listened to the TV too loud. But what finally sent me for a hearing test was one time when we had the TV on the morning news in the bedroom. I thought it was on mute, but then my husband (who I swear has super sonic hearing) started talking about what they were saying. I thought he was pulling my leg since I often tease him that he can hear the TV on mute, so I turned on closed captioning to “prove” that whatever he was saying had nothing to do with the actual news story. I was wrong, and I’ve been wearing hearing aids ever since.

Where I used to work we got annual physicals. Part of that was a hearing test in a proper sound booth.

In my mid to late 20’s it was noted that I had 10 db threshold hearing losses in my upper frequencies each year. This result had me sent out to a formal audiologist for further testing almost every year because of losing more hearing each year.

By my early 30’s I was asked to check on hearing aids but was told by audiologist they wouldn’t help me due to tinnitus. This was analog type aids.

So, job related hearing loss along with typical loud noise growing up, music and guns.

I’m 63 and completely new to hearing loss and aids.
First problem was that my wife always turned our TV down and I couldn’t understand speech.
Then I didn’t hear the beep of our washing machine when it was done.
So I went to an ear specialist who found a high frequency loss and a speech intelligibility of only 55%.
Now I’m testing hearing aids, actually Signia Pure C & G 5AX.

I’m not sure when I accepted I needed hearing aids - but in 2002 my wife threatened me with ‘consequences’ if I didn’t keep stop saying “pardon” every time she spoke to me or me having the TV on loud enough to wake the street.
So I got my first hearing aids. NHS issue, analogue and just about acceptable for the time. 2 years later I climbed on the private audiologist expensive bandwagon with a succession of ever more effective and ever more expensive aids at roughly 3 year intervals

An ear infection in the left ear my parents didn’t know about until I had a white pillow case, around when I was 8-9. A Dr visit to clear it out. “Oh no! Half the eardrum is missing! Time for surgery.” They went in and had a bunch of stuff waiting tableside, apparently, because it was actually the eardrum and all of the sound bones. My hearing didn’t improve much, but got worse again when I was 13-14, so I got checked out again. Another surgery. Everything had rattled loose. Skip forward to last year, when I finally had insurance for myself for the first time ever. (I’ve never had the money for private healthcare. I live in the US.) I’ve been having liquid issues in that ear for a couple of years and known that it’s almost entirely deaf for many years. I only ever had gotten up to “70%” hearing back in that ear. ENT last year had me get a CT scan, after telling me I have scarring in both ears. The hammer is floating in space. That’s why I have “profound loss” in the left.

Taking out that hearing aid at night is like experiencing a departure of a loved one. The difference is astounding, every time. My other ear hears things so well comparatively.

Teaching. (after I had a terrible sinus infection and was hospitalized for 10 days w/ IV antibiotics.) All the kids were having to relay messages to me from the back of the room!

Was not hearing some leading and trailing words with my family & hearing tests with ENT confirmed the hearing loss was there. ENT said HA’s may help - and they have.

I’ve been completely deaf in my left ear since age 8 but was lead to believe there was nothing they could do so I didn’t get hearing aids until around 2010 when noticed a change in my hearing from good ear so I only wore a single hearing aid till around 2013 when I got a wired cros aid. I moved to a wireless cros aid around 2018/19 and stuck with that since

I was 12, we had just gotten the telephone installed. I couldn’t understand what people were saying with my L ear. My hearing has been on a slow deterioration ever since.