Rodney has had a history of Eustachian tube infections which started whilst he was in the Royal Navy. He had a grommet placed in the left ear in 1967 and several more since! Around 10 years ago he also had a grommet placed in the right ear.
These middle ear issues on top of his noise-induced hearing loss which audiometrically runs from 40dB in the low frequencies to off the audiometric scale from 6kHz means that speech wise Rodney does not hear certain elements of speech i.e.. Fricatives and plosives!
What did that mean for Rodney?
In layman’s terms, it is very much like reading a sentence with the above sounds being erased i.e.. P, T, F, S, PH, TH, SH, etc so that you only hear the vowel sounds and lower frequency consonants.
Confusion can come in for similarity in sounding words i.e.. Door / Floor Cook / Nook so at times Rodney could give some quite funny answers to simple questions! You can see why and how the confidence of these individuals can be eroded, and as you age feeling less confident in certain situations anyway. We knew we desperately needed to help
NHS Hearing Aids Sometimes Aren’t Enough
Rodney’s NHS hearing aids whilst offering huge support against no hearing aids at all just didn’t quite help with his ability to cope in background noise. They didn’t give him the aesthetics he desperately wanted to achieve not only for the look but for the comfort of his ears.
With this type and degree of loss, it is often that the hearing aids alone will not suffice in certain situations. Rodney really needed a TV link to help with the television, to put the sound directly into his hearing aids and eliminate any other interference, and in getting into large groups would hugely benefit from a multi-mic. The multi-mic is a Bluetooth microphone that allows more speech to be drawn in from up to 25 meters away and can be placed in the middle of a table so that the hearing aid user will hear better in large groups.
So having assessed Rodney’s hearing levels, the current difficulties he has, we now need the solution. Follow Rodney’s story tomorrow to find out who we partnered with to help him along his hearing pathway.
