Hope Lanter talks about living with hearing loss and wearing hearing aids. She describes increased sensitivity to sound, asking people to repeat themselves, and struggling on Zoom calls with poor audio quality. She distinguishes between normal listening lapses and actual hearing loss.
So wearing a hearing aid, you know, I think we start to get very sensitive. So a lot of people wearing a hearing aid say, "Well, I had to ask somebody what they said. I had to ask them to repeat." I can tell you, in a given day, I'm doing the same thing. I have to ask people to repeat sometimes. I miss what they said. For me, I'm on a ton of Zoom calls and things like that, and so, you know, audio may not be great, but as soon as you say, "Okay, I'm somebody who has hearing loss," then you become very sensitive to asking, and sometimes I think that can be part of the— how do you, how do you understand what is normal versus what is, okay, I have hearing loss and that's why, you know, I just missed what was said. You're fine, it's good, you're going to do fine with this, but it's something we're thinking about that there is some sensitivity there.
