Speechless…

“Oh My God!! This is amazing…TOTALLY AMAZING!!!” I shrieked, forgetting that I was the only one in the office invisibly listening to Radio 4 streaming live to their hearing aids. Even more amazingly, not only could I understand every word that was being said, the clarity of speech made listening almost effortless. Wow. So this was why other people liked listening to the radio! Whatever next, I pondered, perhaps I was going to finally discover how they can follow ‘Top of the Lake’ without subtitles! I let out a little sigh of amusement at the very thought, and eagerly returned to my voyage of wireless listening discovery.

The next discovery was slightly less edifying, however. With Multi Mic and Radio 4 on 100% of my hearing mix, and the real world on 0%, I was now a frightening embodiment of the famous Lombard effect, which causes human beings to raise their voices in loud surroundings in order to be heard. The only difference is that whilst it’s quite acceptable to shout conversationally at cocktail parties, it comes across as totally bonkers in a quiet office.

My talking to myself in a very loud voice was attracting glances from a colleague, and I noticed a question being formed underneath his twitching beard. Unfortunately I couldn’t hear a thing with muted hearing aids and Radio 4 beaming directly into my brain.

“HOLD ON A SECOND…” I entreated, as I tried to remember how to get myself back into airplane mode without aggravating the rapidly developing sore spots on the backs of my ears. All that button pressing combined with the vice-like grip of the new hearing aids was taking its toll, and I didn’t even have my reading glasses on yet. “Oh, stuff this”, I said, giving up on buttons and impatiently ripping the Multi Mic’s audio lead out of the computer in order to take a shortcut to my normal speaking volume.

With normal conversational volume restored on both sides, I began to wonder if I had indeed made a terrible mistake by opting for 100% Multi Mic on wireless. It was all very well hearing Radio 4 with crystal clarity, but not at the expense of everything else. Fearful of taking the edge off my new found enjoyment of faceless speech, I carefully tucked away the Multi MIc and returned to my admin activities on the computer in silence. I needed to preserve all my energies for the ‘Top of the Lake’ TV test later that evening…

Kookybite Innovation #12

 

SeizeControl ® Covert Subtitle Activator & Volume Control

Are you fed up asking your remote-hogging partner for the subtitles to be turned on when watching tv, only to be told subtitles ruin everything? At the touch of a button, this nifty gadget transmits a signal to your tv remote and secretly turns the subtitles on without your viewing partner suspecting a thing. SeizeControl® is cunningly disguised as a half-used packet of hearing aid batteries, and since those things are all over the damn house, it blends in perfectly.

Sit back and enjoy the film, while your partner fiddles with the zapper in vain. Just as they’re about to ring Sky, you can turn the subtitles off just long enough to fool them into thinking it’s sorted, or if you’re feeling really aggrieved at their stubbornness, you can let them go right ahead and pay a £65 callout charge straight out of their own pocket.

Can also be used to control tv volume, to make it too loud or too quiet for your partner, depending on the situation.

Mwahahahaha!

Update Jan 2024: In a massive cultural shift, people apparently love subtitles now, according to this BBC article. The Spouse isn’t convinced…

It’s a turkey!

 

What do you call a Christmas candle in a dimly lit room full of cookiebiters?

A microphone.

* * * * *

What do you call an obstruction in a hearing aid tube?

A blockade.

* * * * *

How does the cookiebiter like their Yuletide pizza done?

Deep pan crisp and even.

* * * * * 

How did the stolen NHS hearing aid die?

It was flogged to deaf on eBay.

* * * * *

Knock, knock

I said, KNOCK, KNOCK

Oh, forget it.

* * * * *

What do Twitter trolls and a badly fitting earmould have in common?

They both give terrible feedback.

* * * * *

A cookiebite woman with hearing aids walks into a bar…

…and straight back out again.

* * * * *

What do Rudolph, Bambi and private hearing aids for cookiebiters have in common?

They’re two deer.

* * * * * 

What’s the difference between children and invisible hearing aids?

The latter should be heard and not seen.

* * * * * 

Why did the dropped hearing aids get ignored?

They fell on deaf ears.

* * * * * 

What do you call a faulty hearing aid battery charger connected to a trip wire?

A deaf trap.

* * * * *

 

Okay, so that’s 11 of the best, but I got a bit carried away. Merry Christmas!

Expletive deleted

Walking through the crowded shopping precinct on the way to work, I knew I was in trouble when I spotted a slightly deranged looking old man rushing towards me, waving his finger as if scolding an unknown entity.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!” he shouted.

I tried to pretend I hadn’t seen him, but as soon as he was close enough to start waving his finger in my face, I was forced to stop. My latest trial pair of multifocal lenses immediately zoomed in on a couple of large NHS hearing aids precariously attached to his head, and I was temporarily distracted by wondering what model he had.

“Excuse me,” he shouted, “where’s the fuckin’ television?”

That’s a bit strong for nine in the morning, even in Glasgow, I thought.

“Sorry, where’s the what? ” I enquired, hoping I had misheard, and wondering just how deranged he actually was.

“The fuckin’ television”, he repeated, “The fuckin’ television”. I tried to look blank as I worked out an escape plan, but the television man was persistent. He continued to repeat his question whilst I continued to look blank, but at least the accusatory finger waving had ceased.

All of a sudden, I picked up on an amplified slushy ‘SH’ sound at the end of fuckin’ television and the penny finally dropped in the cookiebite cortex.

“Ah…the television shop”, I said, relieved that he didn’t have an imaginary television which went everywhere with him. “Which one?”

“Which what?” said the man.

“Which television shop” I replied, “…you said you were looking for the television shop?” I left out the fuckin’ for the sake of propriety.

His response was indignant. Perhaps he thought there was something wrong with my ears.

“Ah tellt ye, Hen…Virgin…Ah’m lookin’ fur the Virgin television shop!”

In my defence, the lip shapes of a guttural Glaswegian pronunciation of Virgin (Vuurgin) and the expletive are rather similar…

 

In retrospect, the lip shapes of ‘telephone’ and ‘television’ are clearly rather similar too, in any accent!

 

 

Do these go to 11?

The mighty chipolatas are turning out to be something of a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and it seems that I have nothing to fear on the hissing front from the new, improved Danalogic i-FIT. In addition, it has been an unexpected delight to discover that they pick up virtually no nerve shredding background noise at work, unlike the Oticons. Unfortunately, over time, this appears to be down to the fact that the Danalogics are transmitting hardly any sound to my cookiebite ears at all, except for a slight Sean Connery slushiness on ‘SH’ fricatives that I can happily live without. My subjective observation that there is a distinct lack of difference between aided and unaided ears is backed up by a massive increase in the number of times during the day when the spouse sighs deeply, rolls his eyes and says “Have you got your bloody hearing aids in” and those are just the times I know about because I’m actually looking at him.

On the upside, my worries about navigating a volume wheel with no default stop have been allayed by simply turning the wheel as far up as it will go at all times; I have been assured that it can’t snap off and there is virtually no audible difference between the minimum 1 and maximum 4 setting anyway. If I’d ever tried that with the surround sound Oticons, my employers would have been scraping bits of my head off the architecturally acclaimed double height concrete ceiling the first time a metal chair leg was scraped across the studio floor.

Disappointingly, on the leisure side, TV is once more inaudible at, or below, spouse discomfort threshold levels, and on the music programme the piano is distressingly distorted. I’ll report on the telecoil setting if I ever find a working loop anywhere.

I have a follow-up at the beginning of October but, for once, I’m not too eager to discover the outcome…

The Upgrade part 3: Will hissssssstory repeat itself?

“Good news, no great change since your last hearing test”, announced the charming audiologist as I handed the sweaty button-push back. “There’s a mild loss in the low frequencies, but nothing significant”.

I peered at the screen while she did a bit of wire untangling for the next bit, and beamed with pride as I spotted a perfect 0dB threshold in both ears at 4KHz. I always like to do well in a test, but zero dB, wow. This was actually 10dB better than it was back in 2010, so I surmised that I should be able to enjoy the hissing of leaves on the trees, the hissing of the sea, and the hissing of hearing aid circuitry for many more years to come. In fact, if things kept up at this rate of improvement, I might even be able to hear the hissing of other people’s hearing aid circuitry in five years’ time.

“Okay, you know the drill”, said the charming audiologist, as sound probes were wiggled into my ears and the chipolatas were wired up ready for programming. The Oticons, now prostrate and deaf on the table, looked tiny and vulnerable in comparison; I remembered my tragic abandonment of the Siemens Chroma S back in 2012 and vowed that this time, the Oticons were coming home with me until I knew that things were going to be alright. If the performance of the mighty chipolatas matched up to their size, I would be happy to let the Oticons go to NHS hearing aid heaven. If it didn’t…well, it didn’t bear thinking about, so I decided not to, just yet.

After the initial programming, the charming audiologist set about a bit of on-screen fiddling with settings, and I started to become anxious every time a hiss or distortion entered the setup. I wished, not for the first time, that I could do the fiddling bit myself, but after a short while, her work was done and the moment of truth arrived.

“Right, I’m just going to talk for a bit so that you can tell me how it sounds”, she said. I listened carefully, relieved that although I could hear some hiss thanks to my freak bat ear peak at 4KHz, it was nowhere near as loud as the last time with the original Danalogics. I’d rather have no hiss at all, but I could live with it. To my cookiebite ears, the 2012 originals had sounded like a basket of chips being lowered into a deep fat fryer at the initial fitting. This time, other than a mild hiss  and air-con sound, there was nothing distinctive to comment on, but there never is in a soundproof room with air-con. Result.

“Sounds okay –  ” I stopped in my tracks.

“Oh… my voice sounds different…not dramatically so, but…different…” I struggled in vain for a description to the sound, but nothing came apart from ‘boingyness’ and I thought I’d better just keep that one to myself since I was supposed to be articulate. I certainly couldn’t hear anything intrusively bad, so after a run-through of the controls and a small tantrum of disbelief upon discovering the fact that there was a volume wheel instead of a push button, no default beep indicator on the volume, and no mute setting, I decided I was ready to return to the outside world.

I thanked the charming audiologist for her genuinely charming and painstaking attentions, slid the sleeping Oticons off the edge of the table into my handbag, and set off with the chipolatas on my ears to experience a whole new world of Danalogic sound.

The Upgrade part 2: Maybe they might be taking them after all…

The very nice new audiologist must have noted my intensely misplaced interest in the Deafblind poster in the waiting room, because she warned me to watch my step on the raised threshold of the audiometry room as I entered. I was very impressed by her charming and attentive manner which made me feel slightly less apprehensive about potentially having to wave goodbye to the Oticon Spirit Zests. I had become rather attached to them, and it occurred to me that they had been listening in on every conversation I’ve had for the last 3 years. Ah, if hearing aids could talk, what tales they could tell, I mused poetically, wondering if if I could patent the idea for espionage purposes. Fortunately the Oticons had their battery drawers open during my previous visit to clinic O last month, and couldn’t hear their digital death sentence being issued by the hearing aid re-tubing lady. I cast my mind back to that fateful morning:

“We’re discontinuing services and spares on these Oticons”, she had announced gravely, as she rummaged through the tubes box, ” I’ll change them for you just now while we’ve still got some left in stock, but this will be the last time…you’re actually due for an upgrade anyway…you’ll get something nice and new instead, isn’t that good!”

“But…but…” I spluttered, “I got these ones ordered specially because of my type of loss, the standard issue ones didn’t work for me, I could hear the circuit noise…what will I get instead?”

‘Please don’t say Danalogic i-FIT 71, pleeeease’,  I beseeched my inner deity, despite it having let me down on quite a few beseechings lately.

“It’ll be one of these”, she said, reaching for the silicone ear model and plucking a brown chipolata-sized hearing aid from its rubber earhole. I should have been distressed at its size and general appearance, which was that of a partially inflated brown water balloon, but I’ve come a long way since nearly fainting at my first sight of a tiny NHS beige prawn back in 2010. Besides, the chipolata didn’t look like the previous i-fit I’d had, so there was still hope. Hey, maybe it was actually a top-notch Phonak or something…tssk, typical of me to have assumed the worst, I sighed. I tried desperately to align the elusive close vision sweet spot of my bifocals with the name on the casing to see if it started with ‘P’, but the re-tubing lady got in there first.

“It’s the new, improved Danalogic i-FIT es 71″ she announced cheerily, before turning her attention back to the disembowelled Oticons and doing a bit more noisy rummaging in drawers.

“But…but…” I spluttered, before the rummaging suddenly stopped and I was hit by the next devastating blow. Having to get my ears syringed again in preparation for the new fitting was bad enough, but there was worse to come; it seemed there was only one longer No. 2 tube left, so I’d have to have a shorter No. 1 on the right aid. I had a flashback to my last experience with a No.1 tube and panicked.

“That won’t work” I blurted unintentionally forcefully, giving the re-tubing lady a bit of a fright. She hadn’t realised what kind of peculiar exterior and interior head anatomy she was dealing with when innocently making her suggestion. I felt bad for being so ungracious, but it was just that the thought of having to gurn my way through the day to keep a too-short tube in place was very unappealing, especially in conjunction with the bizarre cranial contortions necessary to see anything through my new bifocal contact lenses. If all this kept up, I’d have to start wearing a clown suit to work in order to lend some gravitas to my academic image. No, this wouldn’t do at all.

“Just fish the old tube out the bin, and stick a new dome on it” I said, very pragmatically.

No Greater Love…

“This is all your fault!” I shouted at the spouse on the station steps, “If you hadn’t decided to get the same train as me this morning, I wouldn’t have forgotten to put my hearing aids in!

The spouse took a deep breath. Now was not the time for him to question the logic of this last statement.

“…Today of all days,” I ranted on, “I can’t be late for the assessments… and I need to hear what’s being said!”

“Do you want to go back and get them?” interjected the spouse rather sensibly. “We can just get a taxi into work instead.”

I hesitated slightly at the attractiveness of this proposition, but decided to take a more hormonally irrational approach.

“No.” I said, “I’ve managed to get by without the damn things for forty-odd years, and I bloody hate taxis.” A vibration on the metal steps underfoot spurred me into action. “Hurry up!” I snapped,  “we need to get tickets, I can hear the train coming…”

The spouse rolled his eyes as he watched a dustbin lorry rumble past. It didn’t sound anything like a train to him.

Half an hour later, as everyone gathered with their clipboards in the studio at work, my heart sank as I realised I couldn’t make out the pre-assessment chit-chat. I felt a pang of remorse and wished I’d listened to the spouse on the station steps instead of shouting at him. Why hadn’t I just gone back to get the bloody aids when I had the chance? What an idiot. This was going to be a very long day.

Just as the assessment proceedings were finally about to get underway, the studio door opened and the spouse appeared. What was he doing here? He was supposed to be hanging an exhibition in another building…I was confused. Heads turned as he strode in and handed me a tiny plastic snack box. I couldn’t believe it. This was either the smallest packed lunch of all time, or…

“My hearing aids!” I exclaimed, as I noisily snapped the box open in front of my curious colleagues, “Thanks Hun!”

Unbeknownst to me, the spouse had waved me off at the entrance to work and gone all the way back home to fetch my ear gear. Even after being shouted at.

If I hadn’t already married him, dear readers, I’d have decided to marry him on the spot.

Crossed wires

Isle of Arran seen from St Blane’s

The Cookiebite Cortex, the part of the HOH brain responsible for piecing together fragments of speech and making up fanciful interpretations of what is being said at any given time, has two error modes of output: 1. Utter Gibberish and 2. Strangely Poetic. In my experience, Utter Gibberish tends to be the default mode, and the cookiebiter owes a great debt of gratitude to the invention of written language, without which we would be condemned to an entire lifetime of people laughing at our strange turn of phrase whenever saying anything out loud.

Just occasionally, however, the Cookiebite Cortex swings into Strangely Poetic mode, in response to a series of contextual cues from its internal and external environment. I was reminded of this yesterday, as I heaved myself wearily over a stile whilst enjoying a nice country walk in the autumn sunshine. I managed to narrowly avoid ripping my trousers on the neighbouring barbed wire fence, and the brief touch of the vicious metal thorns strung from post to post stirred a long-buried memory; as a child, when I first saw a written reference to ‘barbed wire’, it took me a while to connect the concept to ‘bad wire’, my own misheard version of the name for the shin-ripping wire which lurked unseen in suburban undergrowth, waiting for its chance to painfully ensnare children who were running about after dark in places they shouldn’t…

I Have A Dream

One day, in a far-off digital future, all hearing aid users will be able to tune their hearing aids to their own specifications, all by themselves. Instead of just being able to choose between programmes which suit listening to the tv in quiet, conversing in a noisy restaurant, or trying to tune into a non-functioning loop, they will have access to multiple programmes tailored to individual activities in different types of acoustic spaces. They will be able to swap effortlessly between an open or closed fitting, and they will be able to prioritise music over speech if they feel like it.

Cookiebiters and reverse slopers will benefit most from this brave new world. Instead of being forced to endure a badly modified version of an algorithm designed to fit high frequency losses, they will have specially designed algorithms which will allow access to minute adjustments across the entire frequency spectrum, with smooth transitions in amplification which, for me, will mean no more terrifyingly loud keys in the C6 area of the piano keyboard. I will enjoy full harmonic resonance on the mid to lows when playing Schubert, and spend hours playing low notes with the left hand just because it sounds wonderful.

Until that historic moment arrives, I am making do with my latest hearing aid hack for digital piano playing. The Kookybite Bass Bung® (pictured) transforms an open dome to sort of semi-closed for home musical purposes. Carved from a 60p eraser from WH Smith, it may be a little eccentric, but it works. By turning down the volume switch on my music programme, and trapping the previously lost low frequencies in my ear with the bung, the troublesome C6 zone is dampened, whilst resonance returns to the previously thin bass notes. My piano no longer sounds like the speakers are stuffed with cotton wool, and I have fallen back in love with it again after a rather prolonged playing hiatus. Naturally, speech is pretty incomprehensible with this arrangement, and your breathing becomes a bit Darth Vader, but this doesn’t matter unless you’re playing your piano in a crowded cocktail bar whilst suffering from a lung infection.

One day, when I find someone who knows anything about fitting cookie bite hearing loss, I shall get them to set up my hearing aids to do this properly, so that I can enjoy playing Schubert without the unfortunate downside of being deafened by passing cars…

 

Update: After finding little bits of coloured rubber everywhere, the spouse recently asked me to consider the possibility that I was going a bit mad. I am vindicated, however, by this article which very clearly and succinctly explains the shortcomings of hearing aids in relation to listening to music, and notes how important those low frequencies are. The bit in the article about the high proportion of keys on the piano sitting below the 1kHz threshold  also illustrates why the reverse sloper/ cookiebiter may be on a hiding to nothing with their piano and a default Autofit NHS hearing aid fitting…