Hearing Aid Whisperer

I should have been an audiologist.

Brandt spent alllll weekend writing a paper, so last night he really needed to get out of the house for a while. We quickly decided to have dinner at the new Mexican restaurant in town. Ready to leave, I went in search of the FM system. I found Brandt looking quite frustrated, fiddling with his hearing aid. “What’s wrong?!” I asked. “My right hearing aid isn’t turning on.” Oh, crap. “Uh, the one that you just had completely rebuilt a few months ago?” “Yep.” OH, CRAP.

He turned it off and back on; nothing. He popped out the battery, the one he had just replaced 2 days ago, and tried again. Nothing. Tried yet again. Still nothing. He twisted off the tubing, and suddenly it worked—loud squealing feedback. “Whew!” I said. He twisted the tubing back on, and it stopped working. “Oh.” He did this several times. He held the earmold up to my ear and talked; I heard nothing. He fished the hearing aid cleaning kit out of his bookbag, went to the kitchen table, and stuck a long, thin, green thingie (“it’s a pipe cleaner without the pipe,” he explained) into the tube. Same thing happened. Without the tubing, it worked, but with the tubing, nothing. He could control the settings of the LEFT ear by switching them on the right hearing aid, but no sound was coming through. So I said, “It must be a problem with the tubing…which is weird, because it’s just a piece of plastic, right?” He tried cleaning out the tubing again. Nothing. Then he switched the tubing of the two hearing aids. Now the left tubing was on the right hearing aid and vice versa. Suddenly the left one worked fine, and the right one was silent. Huh. This confirmed what I’d said before, it was a problem with the tubing. “Is it clogged with wax?” I asked. “I just cleaned it out, though...”

In the last 9 months, I have lost count of how many times we’ve had to drive the 2 hours back to Dr. Awesome’s audiology clinic for repairs to Brandt’s new technologies. The right hearing aid stopped working and had to be completely rebuilt, the iCom (Bluetooth transmitter) has been sent off three times for repairs, and the settings have been reset half a dozen times at least. All of this is frustrating enough, but it’s compounded exponentially with the 250 miles we have to travel round-trip for these repairs.

“I really can’t go to the audiologist tomorrow; I’m barely going to get everything done this week as it is!” Brandt lamented, checking Monday’s work schedule on his iPhone. “I will go to the audiologist” I said. “No, I’ll have to go…” he said wearily. I screamed “NO! There’s no way you can go! I will take the hearing aid in tomorrow. Surely they have spare parts, right? Is that part of the actual hearing aid, or is that just another piece of tubing?” Brandt shrugged. “Why do I have so many problems with these?! With my old ones, I just wore them and never had any trouble. But with these, I can’t even go—how long has it been? Two months?—without something happening with them. I just want to hear! Why is that so hard? I just want to hear like normal people! It would be so much easier if I could just hear!” I didn’t know how to respond. So I didn’t. I just sat there, dumbfounded, not knowing what to do, holding back tears. He put his head down and sighed. I stared out the kitchen window. A big brown rabbit hopped up to the window. “Yard-bunny is saying hello to you,” I said, pathetic.

We went to dinner, Brandt one-eared. Half-Earless. He didn’t really want to go there, since it would be “more effort and strain” for me, and I waved him off telling him it didn’t matter for me, I was just worried for him. He did amazingly well considering we were seated right next to the kitchen, there was mariachi music blaring overhead, and a loud table of pee-wee baseball players were sitting next to us. Our waiter was hard to understand, so I did most of the talking to him. The girl at the cash register asked Brandt “How was everything?” when he was fishing for his wallet. She looked at him expectantly; I finally answered, “It was great, thank you.”

When we got home, he went right back to the hearing aid. I said, “There has to be something clogged in it, in that little white thing, the moisture-blocker thing. Try blowing in it.” It didn’t help. “What about canned air? It probably won’t help, but at this point, you can’t really make it WORSE.” (Brandt is a technology-geek—we have A LOT of electronics in our house. Canned air is the best way to clean out all the dust that gets stuck inside the components.) He liked that idea, running off to find the can. I told him, “If the audiologist asks, this was YOUR idea!” He stuck the thin little nozzle into the earmold, and aimed towards a random receipt sitting on the table. After a second, the air puffed out the other end, rustling the receipt. “I saw something! Something happened!” he exclaimed. He quickly reattached the tubing to the hearing aid, popped it in his ear, and turned it on. It was a loooong 7 seconds waiting for it to power up.

“Beep-bee-bee-beep!” I screamed, “OH THANK GOD! I AM A GENIUS! JUST CALL ME THE HEARING AID WHISPERER!” Brandt winced. “It’s definitely working now!” he yelled back. “TOO LOUD?” I asked. He nodded emphatically, adding, “Thank you, honey.” I did a happy dance around the room.