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Practical demonstration of the difference between my ears (both have hearing loss but the left ear is worse)

Was just testing my ears against the sprinkler. Found that my left ear can hear the sprinkler decently well from 20 feet away (though it’s still missing frequencies), can just barely hear it from approximately 50 feet away if I’m really trying, and can barely hear it from approximately 300 feet away with the hearing aid on at volume 6 out of 10. Right ear can hear it well at around the 200-250 foot area, can still just barely hear it around the 300 foot area, and around 400 feet away with the aid at volume 4 out of 10

Now this is dead-on, with my ear turned directly towards the sprinkler. The distance goes down a lot when you add in obstacles like corners of the house and competing noises.

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I’ve mentioned this a couple times by this point, but…I have hearing aids now! They’re over the counter ones, and I do want to try professional ones sometime, but for the moment these ones are working fine. And I was right—my tone of voice (and others’) is a lot fuller when using my aids than it is without them.

So, for several years I’ve waffled back and forth over whether or not I actually want to get hearing aids or not. After all, I’ve always had this hearing loss– it’s not like I’ve ever known anything different. Along with that, even with the audiogram results I still wonder every now and then “Is my hearing really that bad? It’s only mild hearing loss after all, and low-frequency to boot. I can’t be missing that much…” 

A few months ago I made the official decision to try them because I figured it would be better to try them and see, than it would to not try them and always wonder. However, even with this decision, I still haven’t been totally certain whether it will actually be worth it. Again, it’s that question– what could I possibly be missing?

Well, today I noticed something that has officially cemented my decision. No question about it, I am working towards getting hearing aids at my next available opportunity. No more doubts, no more “is this really necessary?”, no more metaphorical waffles.

“What is this great revelation?” you ask. “What could possibly have made up your mind so quickly?” Well, let me tell you. Tone quality. Yep, that’s it.

I was singing to myself for fun, and as I occasionally do, I was systematically plugging each ear as I sang in order to hear the difference between each ear. Usually when I do this, it’s in order to amuse myself with the fact that some of the speech sounds are really different-sounding to my left ear. However, in this instance I found myself registering something else for the first time… 

The actual quality of the notes themselves change from ear to ear. In my right ear, they sound fuller and richer, with both more volume and a wider range to the pitch of the tone. In my left ear, it sounds like someone put cloth over the speaker and muffled the sound slightly– not enough to make me unable to hear or understand it, but enough to lower the sound quality and make it less vibrant.

Here’s the thing… My ears are pretty similar in the low frequencies, with the main difference being in the high frequencies. However, I was noticing the quality difference with both the low and high frequency components of the sounds. My right ear is better than my left in the low frequencies, but only a little bit. And yet there was such a difference in tonal quality…

No wonder my dad was shocked when he put my audiogram into a media audio format and listened to a song or two the way that I heard it. If there can be that much difference in sound from just that little shift in hearing ability, how much more is the difference between what I hear and what the rest of my family hears? I want to know. I want to see if I can know. And the only way to do that is through hearing aids… once I get the funds, of course. :P

Let’s see what happens, shall we? :) Should be fun!

[toomanyhobbiesandthisisoneofthem]

Hearing loss skills no one talks about: the ability to tell whether someone said something you actually need to hear or not, based on their tone and body language

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Random worldbuilding idea (no story in particular, just a thought I had):

A country in which the king lays his cloak on the ground for his people to walk/stand on when approaching him with problems, symbolizing that he is taking up the burden of his people. Although his cloak is washed every so often, it is overall considered in bad taste for the hem of a noble’s outer cloak to be completely clean, as it is the mark of a leader who does not listen to his people

[toomanyhobbiesandthisisoneofthem]

MildHearingLossWins#3(?)

Wasn’t sure if the hearing aids were really all that helpful at first, and admittedly they don’t actually improve much of the speech clarity itself for me (my loss is primarily low frequency) but over the last year ish of wearing them, I can confidently say that they do, even if I don’t wear them all the time. Here’s a few examples of things I’ve noticed with them on vs off:

-I can talk to my mom through the bathroom door without having to stick my ear against it

-yesterday my brother in law said something to me from the front porch when I was in the driveway (about a hundred feet away, it’s a big driveway) and he only had to repeat it once, and even that was only because I wasn’t paying attention the first time

-I can hear the tone of my own voice more clearly, which lets me be more confident when I’m singing, even if it is only to myself

-I can hear various sounds from further away

-I can hear people talking from farther away

-I can hear people talking at softer volumes

-I can adjust the volume of each hearing aid which helps me account for the fact that my left ear is worse than my right (my aids are otc and I fitted them with the app used by this company)

-on those days when my hearing randomly gets worse on my right for no reason, the aids are extremely helpful; that’s honestly the biggest reason I wanted them was because I was sick of not having anything to help with those days

-I can hear various household appliances from across the room instead of having to be right next to them

-Voices sound fuller and richer, and I can distinguish between the different parts of music more easily

It’s nothing crazily extreme or anything, it’s not like I’m hearing a bunch of brand new sounds or anything, but then I wasn’t expecting to either—it is, after all, a mild hearing loss and not a major one (I can hear almost anything within the speech frequencies, I just have to be closer to the sound than most people in order to hear them)

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that’d be too bad…I might get mad.

if my lips ever left my mouth...

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MildHearingLossProblems #35

When your nephew offers to share an earbud so you can listen along with his music and you spend the next half hour trying to juggle hearing the music with hearing your surroundings because he gave you an earbud for your good ear

(I eventually explained what was going on and asked him if we could switch ears and he was very congenial about it, but the problem was that he didn’t think about it in the first place, lol. Just one of those things. But I figured it worked for another mild hearing loss problem post)

[toomanyhobbiesandthisisoneofthem]

MildHearingLossProblems #34

When you turn your headphones up to a volume that’s comfortable for you and your phone complains that they’re too loud.

Also, headphones with volume limitations in the first place.

I understand that frequent too-loud headphone usage can cause hearing loss, but I was hard of hearing before I ever started using headphones, and I need it that loud to be able to hear it well enough to process the sound properly.

Imagine if your headphones started giving you volume warnings at like 50% volume and some headsets capped out at like 70%—now try to use those headphones to get your music up to a listenable level! :P I don’t necessarily want it at a level that’s going to blast my ears out but I do want to get a fullness of sound

[toomanyhobbiesandthisisoneofthem]

MildHearingLossProblems #33

Getting hearing aids for the first time…and becoming paranoid, because you’re hearing sounds from so much further away that it gets you wondering how much other people have been hearing from you when you’ve tried to whisper, or sneak around the house at night.

[toomanyhobbiesandthisisoneofthem]

MildHearingLossProblems #32

Getting your first pair of hearing aids, and discovering your phone makes a (very quiet) low-pitched sound when you plug it in

[toomanyhobbiesandthisisoneofthem]

MildHearingLossProblems #31

Finding out that your sister just announced her new pregnancy by figuring it out from the context clues of the conversation that occurs immediately after instead of catching the announcement itself

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MildHearingLossProblems #30

Discovering that the rest of your family can actually hear people talking from INSIDE the bathroom. Like. They’ll be in the bathroom and then they walk out and just casually join the conversation and I’m like “????…How????!!!”

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reblogging this again because people need to keep this in circulation. :P

Dear hearing aid providers: stop only advertising your hearing aids for old people - from a deaf 19 year old who’s used hearing aids since she was 7

[toomanyhobbiesandthisisoneofthem]

MildHearingLossProblems #29

You hear a faint sound coming from the other room.

Now it’s time to play a game called, “is someone talking to me or is it just the house creaking?”

[toomanyhobbiesandthisisoneofthem]

Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”

[toomanyhobbiesandthisisoneofthem]

Sheesh, AOT songwriters

Okay so I just want to talk about this because I get excited whenever it comes up in my head.

I'm wanting to relisten to a lot of the aot music and recheck lyrics and stuff, because there's a lot of stuff even in the earlier songs that just blew right over everybody's heads until the end of the series when they look back at the lyrics to various aot songs and suddenly go, "wait…waaait…WAAAIIIIIT"

Now, I realize a lot of people who haven’t seen/read Attack On Titan might think I’m exaggerating on this, or just not really know what I mean in the first place, so for any non-aot fan readers out there…Let me…Let me just put this into perspective here.

Imagine you're watching…say…The Hobbit.

Now, this particular version of The Hobbit exists in an alternate universe where not only were the movies made in chronological order, but they also were being developed shortly after the first book came out, before the LOTR novels were written.

So imagine in this hypothetical scenario, one of the songs in the ending credits of that first Hobbit film makes references to a seemingly vague figure that could…potentially be talking about Smaug.

The hypothetical lyrics (I just came up with these on the spot lol) go something like: "Dark Shadow of the East that threatens all our lands, your day of reckoning will come. When the Ringbearer makes his journey, your battle will be over before it has even begun." (But like, in Latin or Elvish or something so that people have to actually translate it to know what it's talking about)

The thing is, at this point in time, all the people watching the movies will automatically assume that the “dark shadow” is referring to Smaug and the “Ringbearer” refers to Bilbo, because as the story plays out, Smaug is supposedly the main obstacle/threat, and Bilbo finds a magic ring, so obviously he must be the Ringbearer.

It's vague enough that it's hard to say for certain whether it's Smaug or not, but since fans of the story in this alternate timeline haven't seen any evidence to the contrary, and Smaug lives in the Eastern half of Arda, everyone just chalks up any discrepancies to artistic license and lets it go at that.

Now, fast forward to the Lord of the Rings books/movies being published. You learn about Sauron, you see Frodo go off on his quest, and then one day you're listening to that song from that first Hobbit film again, only to abruptly realize that- "WAIT A SECOND, THIS IS TALKING ABOUT SAURON???!!!!!! WHAT THE HECK?!?!?! THE LOTR WASN'T EVEN OUT YET???"

… That. That sense of, “WHAT???!!! HOW DID I NOT SEE THIS BEFORE!”- is how Attack On Titan fans feel when, having finally finished the overall story, they're relistening to previous openings, endings, and OST songs and they go to check out the English translation of the lyrics just for fun and then suddenly:

“Foolish indecisiveness, nothing more than an illusion, what even now may be reckless bravery The pawn of liberty. The charge of the assault. Victory to the slave that runs!”

followed by:

“The absurdity in life is the beginning of the onslaught, the stolen lands, the world itself as Eren desires.

As unstoppable rage penetrates him, to the dusk he brings violet skies”

Just. I’m not gonna say anything specific about the lyrics themselves, but… These lyrics make so much more sense now, and I hadn’t even realized there was anything wrong with my previous understanding of them.

[toomanyhobbiesandthisisoneofthem]

does superman actually do this? because that’s hilarious

See, I would say that I can’t believe that Clark’s excuse that he gives Lois nearly every single time he needs to go Superman is that he wants to get a bagel, but given that the first time they met she saw him purchasing three dozen doughnuts for breakfast, a constant need for bagels isn’t exactly outside the realm of possibility.