Mr Halliday has gone through the process with the UK Veterans Hearing Foundation Team to receive some fully funded top of the range hearing aids, and has now been fitted with Phonak B90 Audeo binaural hearing system, benefiting him as the hearing aids have the ability to use the ‘soundcover2’ system to make high frequencies more audible, which therefore makes speech more audible.
Mr Halliday served in many different capacities during his 14 years of service, using and firing all infantry weapons. He also flew in all types of aircraft during the 50s and 60s (for many hours sometimes) all of which were very noisy. Mr Halliday trained recruits in Aldershot for 18 months as a weapon instructor and most of the time were spent on firing ranges, he was called upon to undertake “heat trials” in the UK and Singapore. At that time, he was based in Aldershot and the purpose of these heat trials was to find out the effects on the body by going into battle straight from the UK into a hot climate (Singapore/Malay) – parachute into the country and go straight into battle without any acclimatising as was normally the case. During these heat trials when the body was very tired, he contacted a disease called “Singapore Ear”, it was a very painful experience and took two months to heal. His left ear was never the same again. Due to the fact that his battalion was in Aldershot, the heat trial team (100 men) went to Singapore just with their battle kit, – parachuted in. He did his job and returned to UK, no mention of this disease was mentioned on his medical records as no records where taken.
On testing Mr Halliday it was found that he had mild to severe sensorineural hearing loss in the right ear and mild to profound sensorineural hearing loss in the left ear. Also asymmetry at the high frequencies above 2khz was found. This degree of hearing loss made it difficult to get clarity when hearing speech especially at the high frequencies and he would particularly struggle with hearing speech in background noise.
Mr Halliday’s daily hearing was at the same level all day. He found he kept asking people to repeat as he was mishearing what was said, especially if they were on his left hand side. With Mr Halliday’s new Phonak Hearing aids he can now hear a lot clearer which he is extremely happy about.
