Richard and I went back to the audiologist this afternoon. (Last week he couldn’t get out of work.)

I reminded John that I got my first set of hearing aids at 27, all-in-the-ear types, and they fed back constantly. Constantly! Just turning my head so my hair moved would do it. I asked the audiologist there in New Hampshire if that could damage my hearing–I mean, loud noises from other sources can, right, so…? She flatly pronounced it a no. That made no sense to me.

And then we moved here and I got referred to John; I asked him the same question and his reaction had been to go, and I will never forget the words because I was so grateful for them, “Huh. Nobody’s ever asked me that before. I’m going to go to Stanford to find out.” And he took their audiology department my hearing charts old and new and came back to me and said, Yes, and you’re a classic case. You need to stop using those.

I had lost 15dB of my hearing permanently to them. So I know how important it is to avoid feedback, I finished, adding, and the new right one especially sometimes feeds back.

Yes, it is important, answered John, and took new impressions to make larger, tighter earmolds and hopefully that should solve it.

He and Richard chatted while I heard zero with that stuff plugging my ears.

John, taking the finished impressions out: So the new hearing aids really are helping?

Richard answered that when I got those first aids all those years ago, feedback aside, I was dumbfounded by the world of sound. I’d had no idea how much I’d lost. I stepped out my front door into a quiet morning and had no idea what on earth–oh! It was birds! You could hear birds without seeing the birds? Wow! And I would drop a pin, just to hear it hit the floor. You really could. Who knew. I was ecstatic.

Richard said, And it’s like that all over again. All the other times there have been new aids, it’s never made as much of a difference like it did then, but these do.

I told the guy about hearing the hawk, the jays, the dog I didn’t even know the neighbors had, the high-pitched squeal today as the automatic doors shut again and again at the post office, ear-splittingly loud–in all the twenty-six years of living here I had never known that was there. Wow.

John is a very even-keel kind of guy, but by this point the grin on his face burst into a “YES!” as he pumped a fist. Everything he had hoped for as much as I had, as we had not quite dared to hope. And there it is.

But there’s a little bit of holding our breath. The new type of mold is hard and it is frankly more prone to feeding back–but it is also partly responsible for my hearing so much better. It transmits sound better. If the bigger ones coming don’t fix the problem, I’ll have to go back to the soft type. We all so hope not.

We come back in two weeks when the new molds come in. But I said to Richard, huh. They’re squealing less since we left his office.

Maybe he jammed them in there harder than you do?

Or maybe at a different angle (bigger molds would take care of those variables.)

Still learning. Hoping hard.