A Computer In My Ear

My trial with new digital hearing aids just started today, I have less than a month to try them out. I've had them on for a little over an hour so far and it is an overwhelming experience. I'm going to say now that these are about 2,000 dollars...per aid.

There is a volume adjustment and a single button to "scroll" through programs to match my environment.

Digital hearing aids can be hooked up to a computer and adjustments can be made in almost every possible way and programs can be installed onto it. As of right now I have 3 programs, she said I could only have 2, so that was cool. The first program is called Speech in Noise, so it can be used in a restaurant, any noisy place where I will be communicating with another person. So, technically it focuses on that dominant voice and clarifies and amplifies it. The second program is Comfort in Noise, so that would be at a concert or movie theater, where it's loud but I don't have communication with someone else. And the third feature is for telephones, which usually always work better with LAN lines, hence, my distaste for cell phones.

So I found out that the way my old hearing aids were set up [which I did myself] cut out all low sounds and I was missing out on a lot. So now, with these digital hearing aids, I am basically learning to hear again, I feel incredibly distorted. The main thing is my brain has to adjust, and that could take forever. So far music sounds fine to me, thank jebus. My own voice, however, is completely horrible, I can barely hear myself and it disrupts my ability to talk. Not to mention my left ear has a bit more hearing loss than my right ear, so we spent quite some time messing around with the million little adjustments for my left hearing aid, which didn't get us where I wanted to be. So just hearing one person talk in a quiet room, so far is the only thing I can really tolerate at the moment.

So I am not sure if I'm going to wear these for the rest of the day, since I do have new analog hearing aids as back up, that is my comfort zone there with the analogs. But I have to use these in every environment I can to see how it works. I need to have a phone conversation for sure :p These are definitely little computers in my ears, they even take 6 seconds to actually turn on...it has to boot up just like a damn computer.

Well I could write a whole mini novel on what is going on with my ears but I'll keep it at this for now. Now I just need to be around people and test them out.Oh! And they finally made water resistant hearing aids...but I'm not going to risk that.

This is what they look like, mine are in red