The Word - Vol 100

A milestone worth celebrating! 🎉💯
Wayne Cox writes it, Blue Frog shares it, and YOU make it special—thanks for sticking with us for 100 volumes of The Word!
Much love, the Blue Crew 🐸💙
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What’d Ya Say?

I saw my friend Tony Parsons on TV a while ago. No, he hadn’t come out of retirement to sit in the news anchor’s chair, although he does have a new Podcast! He was featured in a commercial talking about hearing loss and hearing aids. Something near and dear to my heart.  

It’s no secret that the older we get, more of our body parts start to wear out! Ears and eyes seem to be a couple of the first to go, oh, and knees and hips and…well, pick a body part and if you’re a certain age, something is bound to be failing. For me, the eyes were first to go—glasses for driving, and then for reading. I’m sure the hearing was starting to go around the same time, but there was a certain degree of denial, and I don’t mean the river in Egypt!  

I found myself saying “What?” too often. I could hear what people were saying, but sometimes, I couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was at times, one big mumble. And because I had lost some of the high register of sound, talking to anyone with a high-pitched voice in a crowded room was hopeless. I couldn’t hear a word. Who knows what things I had been agreeing to over the years? One tends to nod in agreement rather than say “what?” for the tenth time! 

But again, I was in denial. I didn’t think there was a problem until the family kept nagging me. Sorry, I mean to say the family kept suggesting that I should at least get a hearing test. 

I went to a local hearing aid centre and took the test. The test was a lot of fun. You press a button when you hear various tones, and of course, there will be tones that you can’t hear. I’m sure some of them are close to “dog whistle high” in pitch. And you are asked to repeat words that are fed to you by a recorded voice. The words were chosen because of their similarity. For example, port, porch, and pork. Words that certainly have different meanings, but sound much the same. If someone has any hearing loss, it’s very difficult to differentiate between them. Often, it’s the last syllable or sound in a word that gets lost. The same is true for sentences. The first few words of a sentence are clear as a bell, but by the end of the sentence, it becomes a mumble.  

The results of the test were pretty much what I expected. I had lost the ability to hear sounds in the high tones. What I wasn’t expecting to hear was that once you lose those missing tones, you won’t get them back! I shopped around and took another hearing test at another centre and the results were the same, but the prices weren’t. Here’s a hint, it pays to shop around.  

One day at work, I was relating my loss of hearing and shopping around for hearing aids stories to a friend, and he told me that he was wearing hearing aids. In all the years I had known him, I had never known he had hearing aids. They tucked behind his ear and had a thin wire that led to the opening of the ear. They were almost invisible! So, if there was ever a question of vanity, his example sure eliminated that.  

I finally settled on a set, and they improved my life immensely!  They took some getting used to, because not only were people’s voices louder and clearer, but so was everything else, traffic noise, construction noise, everything. After all, you now have microphones behind your ears magnifying everything for you! My quiet little world had suddenly become a lot louder.

All of this took place about twelve years ago. Recently on a trip to get my aids serviced, I was told that it might be time to update my set. Over those dozen years a lot of advancements had been made, and the prices had come down considerably. I’ve now updated my hearing aids, and the new ones are rechargeable, the old ones had batteries that needed to be changed regularly. And the big advancement is the addition of Bluetooth capability! I can now listen to music or podcasts on my iPhone, even talk on the phone, and be able to listen through my hearing aids. I can listen to my “smart TV” through the aids, again with the use of Bluetooth.  

What I’ve found is that the hearing aids don’t make my hearing perfect, but it’s a huge improvement which is probably why they’re called “aids.” And my wife is a much happier person. I think she had run out of patience with me having to say “what?” all the time! And for that reason alone, the pair of hearing aids were worth every penny.  

The big takeaway? Let me put it this way, the cost of a set of hearing aids is much cheaper than a divorce!  

Till next week….
Wayne

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