A Hearing Aid is Not a Cure for Deafness

My newsfeed blew up today.

 

Apparently, a YouTuber who goes by the name Mr. Beast was boasting about how he helped 1000 deaf people hear for the very first time after giving all 1000 of those people hearing aids. There was not much information shared about these people who are deaf; nothing about how long they had been deaf, how profound their hearing loss was or if they had ever tried wearing hearing aids before. All that was said about them is that all of them were deaf.

 

I was skeptical when I first came across the news. I read the article and, later on, I watched the video. While it was nice to know that those hearing aids helped those individuals who are deaf, I was skeptical about whether or not they understood the sounds the hearing aid helped them to "hear."

 

Then I ended up taking a ride down memory lane.

 

When I had first received my own hearing aid, shortly I had lost my hearing when I was 13, I didn’t miraculously hear everything again right after it was fitted in my ear and turned on. My deafness was not “fixed” or “cured.”

 

Actually, when I had first started using a hearing aid, it took a while before I could actually understand what I was hearing. I did hear sounds, but they were garbled. When people tried to talk to me, it was just jumbled noises.

 

The audiologist assured my parents and me that it would take a while to adjust to the hearing aid. I guess that I had gone without “hearing” sound for so long, that my brain wasn’t used to processing what I was hearing.

 

Fortunately, the adjustment did not take too long. Only about a day or two. But even when I started to understand what noises I was hearing or what people were saying, the result was not perfect. I did not have perfect hearing because of the hearing aid – and that’s because a hearing aid is not meant to try to “fix” what broke inside of my ear that caused the deafness in the first place. I only heard modified sound, not real sound. I missed a lot of words and it took some time to identify what certain noises were and the direction from where they came from.

 

After an extended amount of time wearing the hearing aid, however, I did fare a lot better. Some people thought I wasn’t really deaf because I could understand them so well, and I only had one hearing aid because a hearing aid could not fit into my left ear (my left ear is not really an “ear”; it is cartilage from my rib that was molded into the shape of an ear). But the thing was, I didn’t just rely on the hearing aid to communicate with people; I also read their lips. I relied on this method so heavily that I started to wonder how I would fare with only lip-reading instead of having the help of a hearing aid.

 

I found out several years later, in my thirties, when I developed an inner ear infection and could not wear the hearing aid. It was way too painful to wear it. After the infection cleared up, I tried wearing the hearing aid again, but the infection came back, so I was done with it for good.

 

I have not tried wearing another hearing aid since then. I have entertained the notion of getting a cochlear implant (CI), but not sure if that will ever happen for me either. I’m not against wearing a hearing aid, because I know it can definitely help a person who is deaf to replace some of the hearing they have lost.

 

The thing of it is, though, is that a hearing aid won’t replace ALL of the hearing that is lost. It’s not a cure. Some say that the CI does replace all hearing that is lost, but who knows. I wouldn’t mind finding out if it is true.