Things you don’t want to happen to your hearing aid during Covid lockdown, #2

#1 is running out of batteries, and I’ve already got that out of the way, so I’m going straight to #2: turning your hearing aid into a very fiddly three-piece jigsaw puzzle.

I was just about to join an online work meeting last week, when my screen was Zoom-bombed by a dishevelled weirdo with hair like a burst sofa. Wow, some people have really let themselves go during lockdown I sighed. Once I realised I was actually looking at my own onscreen image, I seized the opportunity to do a quick bit of hair tidying. In my haste, my hearing aid got caught up in my curly barnet and fell into my vintage Olivetti typewriter, which was lying coverless after falling victim to my lockdown tinkerings.

Once I managed to fish the aid out of the complicated interior workings, I saw that the casing over the battery compartment was well and truly knackered. Fortunately, the aid itself was still working, so I breathed a sigh of relief and stuck it back together with Sellotape. No one is going to see me at greater than 72dpi screen resolution for the foreseeable future, I mused. Result!

All went well until it came to bedtime; it turns out that switching off your hearing aid by cutting through several layers of Sellotape with a 10a scalpel is decidedly inconvenient. Knowing that the NHS has much more urgent things to deal with at the moment than my hearing aid, I persevered for a few days but was forced to give up when the Sellotape goo started melting in the heat.

I decided to phone Clinic O to see if the answering machine had any advice and, to my surprise, I heard a real human voice instead. It told me that hearing aid repairs are still being carried out, but you need to post the aid to them with a covering letter. This, quite rightly, is to keep you and your manky germs out the hospital while they’ve got a world pandemic going on.

I hummed and hawed after putting the phone down. The Royal Mail is somewhat ropey at the minute, and my consignment of batteries from the internet still hasn’t arrived after two weeks; what if the same happens to the hearing aid? And then there’s the vanity. When I was originally offered my fancy red aids, it was on the understanding that if I lost or damaged one, I’d have to get a standard beige replacement. Red on the left, beige on the right…hmmm.

So, in the end, I decided to dust off my old hearing aid pimping skills and go for broke. Shhhhh, don’t tell anyone, but I popped out the retaining pin on the casing with a size 00 sewing needle and carefully removed the mysterious innards so that I could get a better view of the casing. I put the broken pieces back together more permanently with some red self-adhesive film more commonly used for custom racing car decals, and Bob’s yer uncle, job done!