Hearing Aids

I got some new hearing aids yesterday. Kathryn had been on me to do it for some time, but whenever she would say something about it, I would just grin and say “hunh?”

I had worn hearing aids some years back, and was thoroughly unimpressed. First of all, they were uncomfortable. If I were just reading, or talking, they were fine, but the moment I ate, drank, swallowed, laughed, or yawned, or just about anything else, they HURT LIKE HELL. Plus, they never worked properly. I could never get the provider to adjust them so that I could hear well.  Once, a technician came out from the factory, and got them so that they worked properly. When I went back in a month or so later to have them cleaned, the local guy said. “Oh! These are all wrong, and adjusted them back to the “can’t hear worth a darn” mode.  I threw the (I was going to say sons-of-bitches but that’s not proper language for a man of the cloth) things away, and went back to being partially deaf. Kathryn called it something about a post, but I couldn’t understand what she was talking about.

So anyway, I went up to Billings and ordered some new ones from a place that had come well recommended by a friend who had similar problems as me, and was satisfied with the results.

Long story short. They seem to work fine. I can hear quite well, and they don’t hurt. I got the kind that fit over the top of the ear, and have a very small speaker that goes just barely inside the ear canal.

I am able to listen to the TV without having the sound turned up to what Kathryn seems to think is wall shaking volume, and still hear what’s going on in the room.  I can hear myself breathe for the first time since I started playing drums in the late 1940s. Kinda neat.

Of course, this is only the second day I’ve worn them, so, as Bill Wilson said in one of his Anonymously penned books, “More will be revealed. But for now, to paraphrase the scripture, “All I know is, I was deaf, but now I hear.”

Agape
Lee