I want a hearing trumpet

Today is Thankful Friday.

I am thankful because I have a fabulous hen do to look forward to – Niknak’s actually.

It’s been organised by The Writer with incredible precision. We even got an amazing handbook telling us what to bring and what would be happening when. It’s a complete surprise for Niknak however.

Anyway, today I have decided to have a Hearing Aid Day – I have these on average once a year. These days usually begin with me opening my dressing-table drawer to get something else out and spying my hearing aids lying there forlornly.

Then I get a surge of optimism that they might actually help me today – that something might have changed and they will give me back my hearing.

So they are on and erm…

Well, I now know that I am a very noisy typer and that the air conditioning sound like an aircraft taking off in my office. But in terms of speech discrimination? Not a sausage!

If anything it’s worse as there’s so much more background noise audible now.

I’ve tried the different settings but nothing is great – and I also can’t remember what the different settings were for, either.

But the conclusion I have drawn is that, right now, hearing aids just aren’t for me.

I’m not being negative about this either, I promise.

In the last four years, I have been amazingly lucky and got to try out no less than four different kinds of digital aids. My audiology clinic is amazing – they listen to me and even took me up to the kids’ clinic when I requested a word test, as this is the best way to find out whether a hearing aid gives me any more clarity of speech.

The ones I have now, Oticon Spirit threes, won by 3 word sounds over the Siemens ones. There wasn’t much in it – but I didn’t like the Siemens one as a design fault meant they didn’t sit that neatly behind my ears.

When I have my hearing aids tuned at the clinic, I always beg them to turn them down as much as possible, because recruitment means that what I can hear and what is painful is separated by very few decibels these days. The first time I walked out of the clinic with hearing aids, a police siren was so loud, I fell over.

This intensity of noise is exhausting. But the problem is, once I shut it out, it means there’s very little amplification anywhere else. Thus defeating the purpose of hearing aids.

If my aids were a hearing trumpet from the olden days, it would be a miniature, dolls house version.

While we’re on the subject of hearing trumpets though, I quite fancy one. Imagine that – you’re in a shop, it’s noisy and you can’t follow what the assistant is saying. Then, all of a sudden, you whip out your ear trumpet and ask them to repeat what they just said.

I love it!

I want one.

Then I’ll just need a handbag big enough to keep one in – oh wait…

…I already have plenty of them!