Advice please: son doesn't want to wear HAs

Grummer said:
i used to use FM but it always broke and it drain the batteries so fast its not funny.and its a real hassle. forget it
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LOL my old FM system would break down on me several times
 
rivenoak said:
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and concerns.

I could have chosen my words differently. I probably still won't choose them correctly now.

He speaks English now (as opposed to German which both DH & I know and could have taught him, but we don't speak it on any kind of a regular basis) because as he grew older that seemed to be his preference. I don't see it as a victory.

Sometimes, I think it would be "easier" to make some of these decisions if he had no residual hearing or if speech hadn't come easily for him. I feel caught between a couple of worlds, who have differering on opinions on what's right for this HOH child. And oddly enough, the pro-ASL stance here isn't what I've experienced in my small real world interactions with d/hh.

It is very confusing for this hearing parent to sort it all out. I'm trying. And I hope that one day when my son looks back, he will see that for the mistakes I made, I didn't make them out of malice and always tried to learn and go forward, and that he will forgive me.
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rivenoak, it does seem like a lot of people are piling on. You're being an awesome parent right now.....It's awesome you reconize that maybe he may need a Deaf program...and I know that if there was a dhh public school program you would totally opt for it. I think maybe you're not quite realizing that Deaf Ed is now becoming really hoh friendly......Yes, your son can hear and talk very well...and it's AWESOME that you guys started out with ASL...but maybe it's time to go back to ASL as a tool.
 
rivenoak said:
And I don't take lightly how many people point out how much worse it can get and why.

I'm still learning how to navigate all of this, and not sure who to ask and what to ask them. I was frustrated when I called ASDB just to ask a few questions and was basically told, "Your school district will know if we're an appropriate placement."

I thought that maybe ASDB could help educate me. Perhaps they can't. Perhaps I have to figure it out on my own in a fight with the district. If that were the case, I wish the lady had just said so.
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Really? I wonder if you fought for a placement....or even look into PDSD. That really might be the key......Unfortunatly traditionally deaf schools have been basicly the dumping grounds for kids who haven't done well in the mainstream. You know, like a last resort placement. But I would fight for a placement at PDSD....the early grades tend to be the BEST and far outshine anything that a public school can offer.
 
Buffalo said:
In early 60's. I had to have two body type hearing aids as my ears needed to hear at different volumes. My mother would take extra cloth from the hem of my dresses and sew pockets on chest for them. I looked like a mature drawf. :)
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My mother wanted to buy me a fake peal necklace that had a HA attach to it! The wire ran up our neck! I say "No way!" It was horrible looking!
 
rivenoak said:
He had the oticon otter with HAs, but that was never one of his favorites.

He still sleeps with a bed full of what he calls his "guys." It's so cute. :giggle:

He likes SpiderMan, penguins, bears, monkeys, and sharks. "Beary" and "Monkey" are the main men and always have been.

Is it ok to call it super power ears?
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I do not see not. I was thinking of trying to make it fun to wear his HA. I hated wearing my body HA when I got older , it looked I have 3 breasts and my ex brother creepy friends when yell into it like assholes!
 
I think the HA on toys is a good idea too. You can buy hearing aids for Build a Bears.
 
rivenoak said:
There is a small button on the back of each HA that I will assume is for VC, as they are turned off/on with the battery case.

In fact, he and I were practicing with the case the other day. For a long time, he had locks on the cases so that he couldn't get at the batteries. Now, one HA doesn't have a lock and the other one's broken, so he can now turn them off when he wants or help change batteries.
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That's great! I think it's a good thing to let him change his own batteries. :)

I found another Oticon brochure on-line for you (I'm an old hand at this, and an information junkie. :) )

http://www.oticonusa.com/eprise/main/SiteGen/Uploads/Public/Downloads_Oticon/Tego/906-65-811.pdf

Check out:

Page 3 Diagram
Page 9 Program selection
Page 11 Volume Control


The pages are per the Adobe Reader, not the Oticon brochure.

As you can see, the button is for the program selection. Apparently your son's audiologist opted not to let your son override the HAs automatic selection between programs.

I'm not sure this is a good idea. From talking about this with other HH people, it seems that HAs don't always make the selection that we humans would make. I can understand that your audiologist is tempted to make things as simple as possible -- but if your son has more control over the sound that he is receiving, he may want to wear the HA more often.
And I do think 5 years old is old enough to understand how to handle this. 5 year olds know how to work the remote control for the TV set right? Some of them even program the DVR! And even the TV remote control is a little more complicated to operate than a HA with the program button and VC options available.

Anyway here's one of the reasons why I really like the ability to choose your own HA program. Most HAs nowadays make the assumption that we will always want to hear the person whose voice is loudest. Well, that's not always true. I actually usually prefer to hear the person whom I'm facing but I don't know of a HA brand currently manufactured that allows people to make that choice anymore. The best I can do is when I want to hear someone who doesn't have the loudest voice in the room is to go into the omnidirectonal instead of the directional program. I have a better chance that way of being able to hear the person I want to hear.

I can do this because I can manually select the program I want. Your son can't do that and that may make it harder for him to deal with his HA.

I would think about asking the audiologist to activate the program selection button. You may want to talk to your son about it first and see if he likes the idea of having more control. If this doesn't work out, you can always go back to deactivating the program selection button.

--

Volume Control -- I was very surprised to see this -- but Oticon has opted to put in the old fashioned wheel! But reading the brochure -- that's in appearance only. There are still preselected volume levels and your son will hear beeps as he moves the wheel. When he hears a beep that means the volume has increased or decreased to the next setting.

As per my previous post, I think your son would be happier with the VC option.
 
No offense, but everyone seems to be searching for the solution in the hearing aid. Listen to the kid. The aid is probably functioning just fine. He just is not getting the benefit from it, or it is creating such jumbled sounds that it interferes with his ability to discriminate.
 
jillio said:
No offense, but everyone seems to be searching for the solution in the hearing aid. Listen to the kid. The aid is probably functioning just fine. He just is not getting the benefit from it, or it is creating such jumbled sounds that it interferes with his ability to discriminate.
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That is why I stopped wearing my HA for my right ear at age 14. I could not make any sense of the sounds that I heard with that HA.
 
If someone had told me at age 13 that i would stop wearing HAs as an adult, I would have told them they were crazy.
 
Bottesini said:
I think the HA on toys is a good idea too. You can buy hearing aids for Build a Bears.
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I am so glad that they have become aware and are offering that. I looked everywhere when my son was small for a pair that I could sew onto his stuffed monkey that went everywhere with him. I finally ended up making a pair out of bakeable clay.
 
deafskeptic said:
That is why I stopped wearing my HA for my right ear at age 14. I could not make any sense of the sounds that I heard with that HA.
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And that probably interfered with being able to understand what you were getting from the left, too.
 
jillio said:
No offense, but everyone seems to be searching for the solution in the hearing aid. Listen to the kid. The aid is probably functioning just fine. He just is not getting the benefit from it, or it is creating such jumbled sounds that it interferes with his ability to discriminate.
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Altogether too often he is unaware of anything wrong. My parents discovered this when I asked who was singing the Twilight Zone music. :lol:
 
Rivenoak,

I have a few more web sites for you in case you are interested! :)

Here's one that shows the category of hearing losses:

Degree of Hearing Loss

Audiologists average the results of the audiogram taken at 500, 1000 and 2000 Hz. They take that average and use the chart to categorize people's hearing loss. Personally, I disagree with this approach. The higher frequencies are very important also, and I don't understand why they are left out. I think it gives a very incomplete picture. But I always try to understand the language that the other folks in the room are using, and this is the language and definition that not only the audiologists and ENTs use, but the government does also.

Anyway, using that approach, your son would probably be categorized as having a mild hearing loss. But I think that overstates his hearing a great deal, because it doesn't reflect how much his hearing drops above 2000 Hz. In the higher frequencies, he's not getting a lot of sound, obviously.

I think its good to be aware of this categorization system. You may find it necc. to occasionally remind others of its shortcomings and how it actually can fall very short in describing a hearing loss.

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This chart shows common sounds overlaid over an audiogram. Obviously the creators of the chart must be taking the averages of common sounds -- but IMHO, it's still helpful.


Dayton Ear, Nose & Throat Surgeons, Inc. - Doctor's Hearing Service

You can see that its likely that your son may hear many speech sounds with his right ear, unassisted with HAs. Because he hears lower pitched sounds better than higher pitched sounds, he probably more easily understands men's speech than women's or other children's speech.

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BTW, I think you and your son could use some additional info from his audi i f you don't have it already. Do you know his word discrimination rate? Did the audiologist give your son that test? Often people with hearing loss located in the inner ear have a better chance of having poorer word discrimination compared to people who have hearing loss located in the middle ear. The poorer your word discrimination the more it means that sound is not being processed well in the inner ear and its getting scrambled. The lower one's word discrimination scores they less likely one can understand amplified speech well. But even for people with poor word discrimination, amplification can be helpful. It can help with speechreading (aka lip-reading) and it helps keep you aware of trucks, cars and other important things happening nearby.

I see brackets on your son's audiogram. I believe that may be your audiologist marking the results of his combined right and left ears bone conduction test.

You may want to ask her to test his ears separately with masked bone conduction tests if she hasn't done so already.

In the lower frequencies your son gets better results in the bone conduction test than in the air conduction tests (circles (right ear) and xs (left ear)). That means that a lot of his hearing loss in the lower frequencies are due to a condition in his middle ear rather than in his inner ear.
You may want to ask your son's ENT what condition your son has in his middle ear that is causing those results. It's possible that could give you valuable information for now and the future.

I would ask around and see if you can find someone that has a mixed loss like your son. I don't know what its like to get amplified sound where the loss is due to a middle ear condition and there's very little hearing loss in the inner ears -- and as mentioned, that appears to be the case for your son in the lower frequencies. That might be good information to have.

And have you ever listened to an audio simulating hearing loss? There are some web sites that have that.
 
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