for me, I have had hearing loss since birth was identified at 3 months old, got my 1st pair at 6 months old
my 1st pair up til 4 grade, a Siemens Infinti S1
2nd pair was an Oticon Gaia
3rd pair was Oticon Safari 600 Ps in purple, of course!
4th was an Oticon Nera P (until parts broke and the earmold was torn up last year so I was done with this BS)
now I have a Sonic Enchant 40 miniRITE! good buy. good deal, no BS
my mom’s was discovered October 2014, got a pink Starkey i30 hearing aid for her 1st, now the same hearing aid as mine but hers is the Enchant 60s
genetic wise, my mom’s and my grandfather’s is caused by the HOMER2 gene which I found out through genetic testing last year (funny thing because that gene causes progressive hearing loss and my hearing loss was very stable all my life moderate to severe, severe as an adult because fat take over but inner blood flow stayed there
Mother’s is mild/severe to profound
I wasn't able to understanding them at very beginning age before kindergarten, got tested (same before as now, I'm 28), I was very silly until I learned my right ear isn't hearing at all time after 8 years wore Phonak Child .
In 2002, I don't recall what Phonak children HA was model name, I could hear around them despite not understanding well them exception slowly speaking.
In 2008, changed to Widex Senso C18 (green transparent, 13 battery), It made feel difference that it got better word recognition but still mumbling at normal pace that I was never figured out at all.
In 2015, changed to Widex Menu ME-SP with 675 battery, same as before while I was very missing environment noise like rustling leaves and machines. It was before I started high school.
In 2022, I learned that Widex was merged with Signia, as they offered me to have the latest model Signia Motion C&G 5x rechargeable battery. After wore them and I was like wow I really can hear rustling leaves and background vehicle noises! It made me happier than I wanted to have a good dynamic range. As currently now I still couldn't understanding their voice due to soft either heavily compressed.
In 2026, I've been trialing Phonak Naida P70-UP, Resound Enzo IA and Bernafon Leox 3-UP in before warranty expires on my Signia Motion C&G 5x. Two of them never been good speech perception in the noise environment as they tried best to adjusting to my user preference, Bernafon was one made me very impressed better speech perception as I wish only they have rechargeable option, the Audiologist told me I can wait for next year as they releases new Bernafon product.
My hearing loss is hereditary on my mother’s side. I passed it on to my children. Bought my first aids about 2003 (57 years old). As usual, should have bought them much earlier. Bought new aids a couple of times over the next 18 years. In 2021 I was eligible to get free hearing aids through the Veterans Administration. I am on my second set of aids from the . Both are Phonak aids, the latest being Phonak Audeo I-90-R.
Even with hearing aids I have trouble following a conversation in a group.
At age 40 I had a virus with an ear infection and noticed a big drop in understanding people with soft voices. My dad and his only sibling also had hearing loss in their 40s so could be hereditary. Since I was working, I got hearing aids pretty quickly. Since then, there has been a decline due to aging but nothing like the initial loss.
I was technically diagnosed with a small amount of hearing loss at birth, but it must not have been made an urgent factor to my parents, because my hearing wasn’t tested again until I was seven and it had started to become actually “visible” in day to day life. Got tested, turned out I had a mild low frequency loss, but the mids and highs were normal. Took a few more tests over the next few months to verify the results. Audiologist didn’t recommend hearing aids, but suggested preferential seating in the classroom and that was about it. So it became a footnote yet again, because the doctors didn’t make a big deal about it so my parents didn’t either..and that’s the story of why I went through my early years knowing that I had a hearing loss, but somehow not actually making the connection that this made me hard of hearing until I hit my teens. I remember reading an article when I was ten about how different people with hearing loss had different levels of residual hearing, and it just all flew straight over my head that the article was talking about people like me, because it just wasn’t something I noticed in my day to day life.
Fast forward five or six years, I got my hearing tested again when I was about to hit 14. At that point, my left ear had developed a bit of high frequency loss, and the low frequency loss had gotten worse (though it was still mild, rather than ranging from 40-25, it was solidly in the 40-35 zone in all of the lows). At this point, it did become recommended that I get hearing aids, which made my dad curious about how well (or, not-well I guess) I actually heard. He put my results through a media modifier and listened to what some things sounded like with my level of hearing…and was immediately on board for the hearing aids (one of those “it doesn’t seem that bad until you put it in perspective” sorts of things). Problem was, every time we had money for hearing aids, something would happen that genuinely needed the money more. Since the hearing loss was still mild, and since it genuinely wasn’t causing me any problems in school, they took lesser priority over various other things.
My schooling itself was never affected, but apparently it did affect my social life without me knowing it. Mom says that shortly before I graduated, she had a conversation with some of the girls from the year below me, who had apparently thought that I didn’t want to be friends with them because I didn’t respond when they would talk to me at lunchtime. Mom explained that I was hard of hearing and probably didn’t hear them talking to me in the first place, and they were surprised because they didn’t know. Having no recollection of intentionally ignoring anyone who tried to get my attention in school, I really must not have heard them. (Which sucked to find out at the END of high school, but at least I know it’s something to watch for now)
Got my hearing tested again at 18; my left ear’s high frequencies had worsened, to the point where the only normal frequency was 3000 Hz, and my 8kHz was at 45-50dB. A small amount of loss had begun to present in the high frequencies on the right. Again, hearing aids were suggested; again, the need for them was recognized, but they kept being put on the back burner.
Then, the Incident happened.
A year or so later, when I was 19, I was getting ready to go in for a hearing test. The afternoon before, I started noticing that things were sounding a bit off, but I put it off as tinnitus, which I had begun to notice was acting up. The next morning things sounded even weirder, but I was focused more on getting ready for the day itself rather than paying attention to my ears, so I shrugged it off again…only to discover during the hearing test that the hearing in my right ear was showing all frequencies as mild to moderately severe (as opposed to the usual “normal to mild”), having dropped significantly in all frequencies. This drop showed up to some extent on a sensorineural level too, so it wasn’t just conductive. The audiologist and didn’t seem overly concerned, aside from making a stronger suggestion for hearing aids, and I was too surprised and confused to realize that I needed to explain that I had been hearing completely differently the day before. I went home with my hearing test…and started frantically taking every online hearing screening I could find, which led me to the website “online audiogram.”
Would like to clarify that the purpose of this website, as stated in the website itself, is NOT to diagnose, but rather to track changes in your hearing over time. If you use the same set of headphones on the same device at the same volume, then you can use it to see whether your hearing is worse than it was six months ago or whatever. And that’s what I used it for. I checked my hearing with that website every day for the next week. And lo and behold, the thresholds improved—to the point where I knew for a fact that I was at something close to my usual baseline hearing by the time the week was up.
This has been a recurring thing, though thankfully infrequent. There is no vertigo when it happens, and the usual symptoms of eustachian tube dysfunction are absent too. So I don’t know what it is.
I had another hearing test a couple years after that, which proved that my hearing was different than usual during the previous test. Both the and thresholds were significantly better than they were two years earlier. The audiologist even made a page comparing the two.
Honestly I think part of the problem is that we were probably supposed to be the ones asking for any follow up appointments to check out weird things, and my parents just treated the hearing check appointments like a regular checkup and never asked for anything extra. So this has never been checked out. But in the course of observation, I have come to find that my hearing often goes kaput in my right ear for a few hours or days in response to certain types of air pressure changes. (Once, it happened for a full month!)
Anyway, it’s been awhile since my last hearing test. I don’t know what my thresholds are right now. But I did finally get some hearing aids—over the counter, but they do genuinely help.
Unless something has changed, my left ear is currently borderline mild/moderate between 250 and 1500Hz, slight/mild at 2000Hz, normal at 3000 Hz, and then drops straight to mild-sloping-to-moderate after that. Right ear has better high frequencies, but the hearing in that ear still takes a nosedive after 8000Hz, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that spreads into the speech frequencies on the high end too at some point (if it hasn’t already)
Honestly, if I could travel in time, I would tell my audiologist at 7 to test my hearing above 8000Hz, because I suspect (but will never know) that the left ear, at least, might have shown signs of the beginnings of high frequency loss even back then, or at least abnormally weak ultra-high frequencies for how old I was. When I look at my audiograms from when I was 7 and 8, there are places where the left ear seems worse than it should have been at that age in some of the high frequencies, and there is a vaguely downward slope after the initial leap up to normal mids, even though all the high frequencies were still within the normal zone.
