All through high school my mom complained about not being able to hear and she would constantly say, "what?". I was already used to speaking up because my nana had hearing problems and had been through multiple hearing aids. When I was a senior in high school, my mom went to the doctor and they determined that there was no physical damage to her ear. Her hearing problem was hereditary and also due to noise damage. According to Newsweek's June 6 article on hearing, "prolonged exposure to sounds above 85 decibels (motorcycles, lawn mowers, or hair dryers) can cause hearing loss." Her next step was to see an audiologist, a person who specializes in finding the correct type and model of hearing aids for someone.

There are basically two types of hearing aids, analog and digital. Analog hearing aids are made with a specific frequency that is based on an audiogram, which Webster's defines as a graphic representation of the relation of vibration frequency and the minimum sound intensity for hearing. This means that the manufacturer installs specific settings, with some adjustments possible for the patient to make. This hearing aid essentially makes all sounds louder, including speech and background noise. After the patient gets the hearing aid, the audiologist can use a computer to make small adjustments for different situations or the patients specific needs. This hearing aid is the most basic and cheapest kind.

When my mom had to decide what hearing aids were best for her, she was lucky enough to have the option to buy the more expensive digital kind. Digital hearing aids are similar to analog but a computer chip in the hearing aid is able to take sound waves and make them digital signals. This means that the chip analyzes the signals in the environment and determines if they are speech or noise. For example, when my family eats at a noisy restaurant, my mom's hearing aid is able to kind of block out the background noise and make the conversation voices clearer. The audiologist adjusted my mom's hearing aids for the first year or two before she really felt comfortable and the hearing aid became very specific to her ear and her needs.

Even though hearing aids help a great amount with people's hearing, it does not totally fix someone's hearing like glasses would fix someone's eye sight. I remember wanting to try my mom's hearing aids when she first got them. I put one in my ear and I immediately felt like I was in an auditorium talking into a microphone. It was so odd and I could not imagine having to wear them all the time. When she has them in, you can hardly see them, except for a little stick with a ball on the end to pull them out. She looked like she had little antennas sticking out of her ears, which we still joke around about. Template:Image url="http://www.hearingcarecenter.com/Images/hearing aid.jpg"

She has definitely gotten more used to them, but there are many little things on a daily basis that reminds her and us of the hearing problem. Some examples of this are when she has to stop a conversation or what she is doing and change the battery that is about the diameter of a pencil eraser. Or when I hug her, I sometimes bump her hearing aid and it makes a little beeping noise. My family also knows what restaurants are noisy and what restaurants have good sound barriers. Another example is that she also has to take them out when she drives our convertible because the wind would be too loud with the hearing aids in. Also lot of the regular phones in our house are either speaker phones or special hearing phones. Music has alwayss been a large part of my mom's life but with the hearing aids she cannot really make out the words so we recently got her a mini ipod for Mother's Day that has allowed her to put music back into her life.

More than 28 million Americans have some degree of hearing loss, and that number is only growing. There is a need to prevent hearing loss in today's world in which TV and music are louder than ever. Newsweek also states, "If they don't take steps to protect their hearing, the iPod Generation faces the same fate as the Woodstock generation. Or Worse." To learn more about hearing loss and what you can do to prevent it, visit: [[1]] and [[2]]