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I have had slowly deteriorating hearing for the last twenty years and assume, as it gets worse, that one day I will need to embrace a hearing aid. Which is just an introduction to this story which I was told yesterday, purporting to have happened to someone known to my wife.
His first reaction on being fitted with a hearing aid was that the world was a noisy place. His second was that he still couldn’t hear his wife that clearly when she spoke to him but knew that the device had to be ‘tuned’.
When he talked to his audiologist about this they said that he could bring his wife in and they would test the frequency of her voice and then they could tune the hearing aid so that he couldn’t hear her at all!
My wife’s sadly departed step-father was virtually deaf and wore an aid. When things got too much for him and the family were there making a lot of noise he used to sit in his favourite chair, turn off the world and go peacefully to sleep.
My father-in-law is completely deaf and I sometime envy him when we’re round there and the kids are running riot and the mother-in-law is talking at her usual volume of 300dB (she got louder as my father-in-law got deafer and when he went completely deaf she stayed at the same volume) and he can sit there oblivious to it all.
There is a certain attraction to this I have to say and my mother-in-law did exactly the same thing – got louder and stayed louder.