Friday, October 12, 2012

Hearing better helps me see more clearly


Happy belated Thanksgiving! The trees have burst alive into a thousand different shades of green, red and yellow and these colours have never ceased to amaze and inspire me. I’m grateful I can see these colours. Thanks to my friends and colleagues at CNIB as well as our clients, I hope I never take my sight for granted. It’s a pleasure to try to describe our surroundings to my friends with vision loss, I love taking on the role of a walking, talking, coffee loving, audio description tool. I’ve had a busy few weeks and have been unable to put hands to keyboard regarding my experience with the Phonak Solana 312 Bi-CROS but am back and will try to retrace my steps.

I’m Single Sided Deaf (SSD) in my right ear and have moderate hearing loss in my left. I want to go back to the moment Jessie fitted me with the custom hearing aid and how it felt.  For the past seven years I’d been lip-reading, trying to sit in just the right spot in meetings to hear and my ability to communicate was hampered, but I could manage all right. I had no idea how much better things could be.

I sat in the chair, Jessie took me through the technicalities and  put 
the hearing aids in. To say that the world exploded into a burst of audio colour like the autumn leaves change in October might be a little dramatic, but the colour of sound immediately became more vivid and rich and beautiful.

She sat beside me on my deaf side and asked, “How does it feel”? I replied that I could hear her perfectly and asked if she could she whisper something as softly as she might ever whisper. She looked over at my coffee cup and gently whispered….. “Starbucks.” I was overwhelmed, it was crystal clear.

We went through some questions on sound I would have to answer on two subsequent fine tuning appointments and a few more technicalities. Jessie told me she had never seen anyone so enthusiastic and said that many people were hesitant to take the plunge toward wearing a hearing aid. Technology has come so far and you can barely see them now, I wish everyone who needed adaptive technology of any kind could get it. Anyway, I was blown away and the coffee helped. Real world testing is next! Please stay tuned.