Now ‘ear this — Why the Oticon OPNs are the best technology I’ve bought in years
“You’re going to need to see an Audiologist. You have high frequency hearing loss”. The doc only confirmed what I already knew. What I didn’t realize was how profound it was or how much it was impacting my life on a daily basis. Four hours later I was sat opposite an Audiologist.
“Do you always feel tired or drained?”, she asked. My response was a resounding yes, but, I’d never connected the need to sleep soundly on the train every evening with my inability to hear what people were saying during the day. My original request that the doc take a look at my ears during my medical came about because of a few things Rhona, my long-suffering wife, had been saying with increasing frequency.
“Why are you banging your keyboard?” — I don’t (I actually do).
“You’re shouting. Stop shouting” — I wasn’t (I totally was).
“Turn the TV down, you’ll wake the kids” — I can’t hear it (I still can’t).
Restaurants or bars were the worst. Anything more than a single conversation was impossible, frustratingly so, to hear. Add in even mild background noise and I was toast. It just all sounded like a jumbled mess.
I can’t remember how long I’ve been lip-reading for, but I did find I was doing it with increasing necessity. And boy, is it tiring. It’s also ironic because one thing I try and teach my kids is to listen with their eyes. By which I mean, engage by looking at who they’re talking to.
According to Healthy Hearing, high frequency hearing loss isn’t all that uncommon. There’s a variety of causes including long exposure to noise, aging, genetics, ototoxicity or disease. My medical was clear, I’ve never really been one for going to gigs, not been exposed to large quantities of drugs and in my early forties, I’m hardly what you’d call old. Given my dad’s inability to hear most of what’s going on around him(jury’s out on whether this is a physical or mental reaction), my money is on genetics.
Healthy Hearing puts some meat on the bone (temporal, in this instance) in defining the impact pretty well:
Work for me was largely manageable as most discussions were one to one. But, if discipline got lost in a meeting, I would be quick to bring it back to a single conversation — selfishly, mostly — so I could hear what the fuck was going on. Largely though, if I couldn’t see it being said, I couldn’t hear it.
Yesterday, on the way out of a meeting with a guy I’d just met and only spoken to previously on the phone, he pointed to his ears as he looked at me and said “I need some of those. The doc says my hearing is fucked”.
Someone noticed.
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It’s been four weeks since I first slipped a pair of Oticon OPNs into my ears and he was the first person to call them out. Nobody I work with has asked, or said, anything (unless I did first). I told a few people up front. Some when I got them. Others I simply haven’t said anything to.
You can see people looking. People I know well. People I’ve never spoken to. They sort of look past you at the piece of wire sticking into each ear. It’s fine. Sometimes I forget they’re there. Nobody says anything, I guess, so they don’t draw attention to them (though if you’re reading this and you know me, feel free to ask or talk about them).
Wearing hearing aids is no different to wearing glasses. Glasses for the ears, I call them. My dad should have got them 30 years ago. I’m glad I didn’t wait.
Hearing aids have improved immensely in the last five years, I’m told. Mine connect to my phone. I can have conversations through the OPNs — no additional headset required (at four and a half grand a pair, the microphones on these things are REALLY good). But this makes me look like I’m talking to myself. So I stopped.
But I can do many other things which I won’t be stopping:
I can watch videos in bed without testing my wife’s endless patience (sound from my phone goes right into my OPNs and from there directly into my head — it’s like having surround sound for the brain).
I can watch TV at a volume that works with me (sound passes through the digital cable to a TV connector on its way to my Sonos so the sound goes right into my head* — it’s very weird, but no more arguments on volume).
I can listen to music from my phone. But people can’t “see” that I’m listening to music, which can be awkward.
I can go a whole day without feeling mentally drained.
I’m less angry/frustrated. Not totally anger-free, but close.
*This doesn’t stop me being able to hear people talk.
This morning my son’s friend’s dad made a joke about my hearing aids, asking if there was a switch that allows me to turn off my wife’s voice (there isn’t, but I can lower the volume) and whether my kids have hacked them yet (they haven’t, but they will).
So, now I need to get used to this as a permanent addition. My hearing will not get better. I could stop using the aids, but then I’d go back to constant ringing in my ears (24/7) and having to concentrate 20–30% harder, just to hear what was going on. Fuck that.
I’m going to stick with them. On the whole the OPNs are pretty good. Certainly good enough to recommend (though I haven’t tried others) and as a piece of tech, by far the best I’ve seen in a long while. If you’re having trouble hearing, don’t let it go. Get it seen to. Matt, who I met yesterday, promised to take the free trial. I really hope he does and it has as much of an impact on him as it has on me.
When I was about eight my parents were complaining at dinner that I wasn’t saying much. My grandad, who was visiting for the day, remarked that I was “a quiet talker, but a good listener”.
Turns out I’m a quiet listener now, too.
