Hear Thee!
A few days ago I received my introduction to the world of hearing aids. My father would be most proud of me; in lieu of scheduling an appointment with an audiologist or some 'hearing specialist' within my insurance plan, I ventured to Costco. To put this comment in perspective I should explain that my dad exclusively consumes at Costco. For example, his pet (all be it a stuffed one) was not only purchased at Costco, but was given the namesake of the Costco brand, Kirkland. In all fairness, the hearing specialist I associated with at Costco was very professional, knowledgeable, courteous and patient. It truly was of my more pleasant and productive medical events which I'd highly recommend to anyone.
I should perhaps provide a brief historical perspective of my hearing issues, if only for the fact that as memory follows the path of my hearing that this will serve as a record for myself. I have never heard well. Through body language and context, I usually do just fine in face-to-face communication. But when I'm in a different room than someone and trying to hold a conversation, at a live performance (up there in the non-prime seats) or even watching movies, I miss a lot of the conversation. This problem will consciously started to effect me upon beginning to study the Chinese language. The ever so subtle differences in the pronunciation of consonants is completely lost on me. A combination of all these made me desire to quantify my ability to hear. I've long held a belief that I really haven't wanted confirmed, that my ears work fine but my brain is just too slow to process the sounds correctly. It's always made sense to me because I feel like I hear things very well, at least the existence of some sound pressure, but I just can't distinguish it very well.
Costco Hearing Centers have these neat little anechoic chambers in which the hearing characterization is performed. They run tones directly into your ear canals via air tubes inserted through foam ear plugs (no headphone/ear-bud fitting problems) and have you click a button any time you hear a tone. It's not like the old elementary school hearing tests where you just listen for the tester to loudly click some dials which triggers you to raise your hand regardless of tone recognition. This is fully computerized with no audible clicks. I found that I was listening so hard that sometimes my own brain seemed to generate beeps and thus I clicked. I found that I annoyed the tester a bit because then I'd yell out that I think I just clicked on a brain beep and not a real beep, and thus would proceed to miss a real beep. They also characterize your ability to recognize compound words (e.g. tree-house, pie-pan) in the presence of white noise. I felt I did really good, especially when they threw me some surprising ones such as 'pot-house' and 'ass-rash' that I nailed. My specialist informed me that I failed.
My results determined that any sound at frequencies greater than 2 KHz is greatly attenuated by my ears. Or to be more specific, these sounds are attenuated by the 'hair cells of my cochlea'. I don't know much about this stuff, but if my ear hairs grow anything like my nose hairs than I think I understand the problem. By 3 kHz I don't effectively hear anything with a sound pressure level lower than 60 db and requiring 80 db by 4 kHz. I don't know how to really put this into useful perspective except to say that I don't hear the crickets in the house which drive my wife insane. So what does this mean for my day-to-day hearing? Well this is best described by observing the 'Speech Banana' figure included (see above). Isn't that a clever name? But it is rather fitting and it describes the frequencies and intensities of 'normal' person-to-person conversation. So from the 'Speech Banana', it is clear which portions of conversation exist above 2 kHz and thus I do not hear. Effectively any -ch, -th or -sh sounds are not audible. On the spot, the specialist programmed a hearing aid compensating for my exact hearing profile and let me try it out. WOW! I never realized how long words that end in s or f resonate on. I had this urge to open up a bunch of soda bottles just to really hear the fizz release in a whole new way.
Companies based in all corners of the world are banking on our abundance of aging baby-boomers to both live a long time and have poor hearing. Costco alone carried five unique brands complete with with multi-page color brochures of people doing yoga, running on the beach and doing cartwheels. No pictures of people enjoying the theater or just talking, but there was a sky diver too. But alas, all was not perfect in the Costco Hearing Center. The hearing aid I tried out was $1399. For one. That's a lot of money. And a hard one to justify. Not as necessary as my glasses, definitely above any sort of cosmetic surgery such as teeth whitening, kind of down there in the corrective eye surgery realm. Costco Hearing Centers have a 60 day money-back guarantee policy, but I don't know how moral it is to purchase them with a plan to take them back. If I owned a business I wouldn't like that too much. And what if they do make a significant difference?
I should perhaps provide a brief historical perspective of my hearing issues, if only for the fact that as memory follows the path of my hearing that this will serve as a record for myself. I have never heard well. Through body language and context, I usually do just fine in face-to-face communication. But when I'm in a different room than someone and trying to hold a conversation, at a live performance (up there in the non-prime seats) or even watching movies, I miss a lot of the conversation. This problem will consciously started to effect me upon beginning to study the Chinese language. The ever so subtle differences in the pronunciation of consonants is completely lost on me. A combination of all these made me desire to quantify my ability to hear. I've long held a belief that I really haven't wanted confirmed, that my ears work fine but my brain is just too slow to process the sounds correctly. It's always made sense to me because I feel like I hear things very well, at least the existence of some sound pressure, but I just can't distinguish it very well.
Costco Hearing Centers have these neat little anechoic chambers in which the hearing characterization is performed. They run tones directly into your ear canals via air tubes inserted through foam ear plugs (no headphone/ear-bud fitting problems) and have you click a button any time you hear a tone. It's not like the old elementary school hearing tests where you just listen for the tester to loudly click some dials which triggers you to raise your hand regardless of tone recognition. This is fully computerized with no audible clicks. I found that I was listening so hard that sometimes my own brain seemed to generate beeps and thus I clicked. I found that I annoyed the tester a bit because then I'd yell out that I think I just clicked on a brain beep and not a real beep, and thus would proceed to miss a real beep. They also characterize your ability to recognize compound words (e.g. tree-house, pie-pan) in the presence of white noise. I felt I did really good, especially when they threw me some surprising ones such as 'pot-house' and 'ass-rash' that I nailed. My specialist informed me that I failed.
My results determined that any sound at frequencies greater than 2 KHz is greatly attenuated by my ears. Or to be more specific, these sounds are attenuated by the 'hair cells of my cochlea'. I don't know much about this stuff, but if my ear hairs grow anything like my nose hairs than I think I understand the problem. By 3 kHz I don't effectively hear anything with a sound pressure level lower than 60 db and requiring 80 db by 4 kHz. I don't know how to really put this into useful perspective except to say that I don't hear the crickets in the house which drive my wife insane. So what does this mean for my day-to-day hearing? Well this is best described by observing the 'Speech Banana' figure included (see above). Isn't that a clever name? But it is rather fitting and it describes the frequencies and intensities of 'normal' person-to-person conversation. So from the 'Speech Banana', it is clear which portions of conversation exist above 2 kHz and thus I do not hear. Effectively any -ch, -th or -sh sounds are not audible. On the spot, the specialist programmed a hearing aid compensating for my exact hearing profile and let me try it out. WOW! I never realized how long words that end in s or f resonate on. I had this urge to open up a bunch of soda bottles just to really hear the fizz release in a whole new way.
Companies based in all corners of the world are banking on our abundance of aging baby-boomers to both live a long time and have poor hearing. Costco alone carried five unique brands complete with with multi-page color brochures of people doing yoga, running on the beach and doing cartwheels. No pictures of people enjoying the theater or just talking, but there was a sky diver too. But alas, all was not perfect in the Costco Hearing Center. The hearing aid I tried out was $1399. For one. That's a lot of money. And a hard one to justify. Not as necessary as my glasses, definitely above any sort of cosmetic surgery such as teeth whitening, kind of down there in the corrective eye surgery realm. Costco Hearing Centers have a 60 day money-back guarantee policy, but I don't know how moral it is to purchase them with a plan to take them back. If I owned a business I wouldn't like that too much. And what if they do make a significant difference?
posted by Brian @ 9:05 PM
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