Starkey Hearing Aid Stopped Working

I don’t know that anyone will be able to help, seeing as this involves Starkey, which seems to be one of the less popular brands, and CROS, which makes it an even rarer beast, but I want to at least report, and vent, and maybe get some commiseration or advice.

I was fitted with Starkey Genesis BiCROS hearing aids at the end of July, so they’re not even two months old. I charged them last night, as usual, and put them in this morning, as usual. When I got to work, I discovered that the CROS transmitter (on the deaf ear) wasn’t working (since it doesn’t actually produce any sound, it’s often not obvious it’s on and functioning). It wouldn’t turn on. I even ran home to get the charger to see if that would somehow help. It’s now fully charged, and still nothing (the light on the charger blinked to show charging, and then stopped blinking, showing a full charge). And of course, the return period expired just yesterday (Friday the 13th as it happens).

So, Starkey or not, has anything like this happened to you? Any troubleshooting tips? How do you cope? I really hope this is just some profound bad luck and some kind of fluke, and not a common occurrence, or some flaw with Starkey. I hope and presume this is covered by warranty, but still. What in your experience does it take to get a replacement or repair, and how long does it take (in the United States, if relevant). Since I’m a hearing aid noob, I’m wondering how often failures occur, and how you deal with it.

And just to continue my tale of woe, I am on the one hand very lucky that I got the hearing aids through my union, which means I paid a fraction of the price at a private clinic. The downside is not a lot of customer service, and it can take weeks to get an appointment with the audiologist (she’s one person dealing with the hearing aid needs of 150,000 members). To top it all off, I’m traveling in early October, so I’m facing the real, or even likely, possibility of having to travel for two weeks with just one ear.

The saving grace is that the hearing on the “good” ear, which also has a hearing loss, still works, so I can still hear properly on that side. And I’ve been dealing with single sided deafness for years, so that’s still an improvement over a month and a half ago. So, to an extent this is a first world problem, but dang, it’s frustrating. Getting the hearing aids in the first place was something of a rigmarole, and I was so excited finally to be able to hear properly again.

I’ll contact them on Monday and do my best to get them to act as quickly as possible, but that probably doesn’t mean fast. Like a said, I got top-of-the-line prescription hearing aids for dirt cheap, as such things go, but it was a long process. The appointment for the first consultation took months. Then weeks for the actual fitting. I started with a “basic” tier model, and decide to upgrade to “premium” tier, which meant returning the hearing aids, so I had none at all, and wait yet another month for another fitting. I’ve been back for an adjustment, and that appointment took close to two weeks. So I’m not that hopeful that things will be done before the beginning of October. I’m quite certain they don’t have loaners. I didn’t even get to try different models. If I wanted to, I would have had to get the first pair, return them, wait again to be fitted with the next pair, rinse repeat. The audiologist recommended Starkey, so I got Starkey. I asked her why, and the answer was, for reasons I don’t quite understand, another brand would have cost me $1,000+ more. It had something to do with CROS hearing aids and the deal they could get from Starkey versus the other brands.

I’m trying to stay sanguine about the whole thing. Six weeks ago I had no hearing aids at all, so just one is still an improvement. The other ear has been near deaf since forever anyway. At the end of the day it’s a first world problem. I’m lucky that I can get hearing aids at all (so many can’t), never mind highly subsidized ones. But it sure is frustrating, though.

Part of me is quite frustrated and disappointed, I’m not generally an optimistic person, but I’m trying to make the best of things. I’m no worse off now than I was two months ago. This will get sorted eventually, and this too shall pass. Or so I try to tell myself.

This is a service the union provides its members. They subsidize the hearing aids, no one is making any money. The savings is to my pocket, to the tune of over $1,000, so she was looking out for my interests. As I said, this isn’t your typical clinic that has a dozen makes and models for you to try. You get one pair, and if you want to try another you return them, wait a month, and get fitted with the next pair. So no, the service isn’t the same as if you paid the full cost out of pocket. But I saved $5,000+, so to my mind a reasonable trade-off. And I get a real AuD, who I think is decent and competent, and can fit CROS, complete with real ear measurements. Since I need CROS, Costco and OTC are not options. I was reasonably happy with the Starkeys, at least until the failure happened, though I don’t have anything to compare them to. I have thought about going to a private clinic and paying out of pocket for some adjustments, and maybe ongoing maintenance, since I don’t get a lot of follow-up from the union.

PS I added my audiogram. I have piss poor word recognition in my left ear, “no useful hearing” they say.

I have severe hearing loss in one ear, with piss poor word recognition. “No useful hearing,” says everyone from the first audiologist at the hospital who did the first test, to the ENT, to the second audiologist who fitted the hearing aids,es who all recommended CROS. Amplifying that ear would do no good, as I still wouldn’t understand anything, and might make things worse, as all I’d hear is distortion. They might also say that that ear is “unaidable.” The other ear has more typical moderate to severe age related hearing loss in the high frequencies, so that ear gets a regular hearing aid (plus the sound that’s piped in from the CROS on the other ear).