Hear Well After Fifty

Robert Ashworth

Writes for Hear Well After Fifty

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My granddaughter said her first real sentence at a Thanksgiving dinner a few years back, something with a subject and a verb, or so my son told me afterward when I finally asked. I was sitting close enough to have heard every word of it. Instead I heard the table react, smiled along with everyone else, and only learned later that I had missed the whole thing.

Before that dinner, my wife had been telling me this in smaller ways for about two years. Repeating things I had missed. Noting, more patiently than I deserved, that the television did not need to be quite that loud. I had my own theory ready: thirty years as a school principal, eight years teaching before that, spent in buildings that are loud in ways you stop noticing, hallways between classes, a cafeteria at lunch, a gymnasium during a close game. Nearly forty years of that seemed like a reasonable explanation. It also happened to be the explanation that let me avoid doing anything.

After that Thanksgiving I finally saw an audiologist and got fitted for hearing aids. The difference surprised me, which told me something about how much I had already been compensating without noticing, choosing the quieter chair, leaning toward whoever was talking, watching faces more than I realized. A few months in, I started reading about supplements meant to support hearing health and found the same problem everywhere: bold claims from the companies selling them, almost nothing from anyone who had actually lived with a product long enough to know if it did anything. So I started my own record. A short weekly note on how conversations felt in the settings I actually care about, restaurants with unpredictable noise, phone calls with no face to read, family dinners where three conversations run at once. Not a score. Just whether I got through the evening without asking someone to say it again.

Three years in now, I have logged four different supplements, with gaps between each so the effects would not blur together. Martin Callaghan, the gym teacher I worked alongside for eighteen years, still teases me about the legal pad and insists his own hearing is fine while cupping a hand behind his ear at dinner, which I understand better than I let on. Glenda Farrow lives across the street and started wearing hearing aids about six months after I did. We have taken to comparing notes over the fence about which restaurants in town are actually survivable. Vincent Palumbo, a man in Providence I have never met in person, started emailing me after reading one of my early logs and now sends voice memos instead of typing, because apparently typing feels imprecise when you are trying to describe what a conversation actually sounded like.

None of that makes me any kind of expert. What I bring to this is patience and a fairly obsessive habit of writing things down, not a clinical background. If your hearing is changing, the person who should be making the calls is an audiologist who can actually measure what is happening, not a retired principal with a legal pad and three years of notes.

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Disclosure

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only write about supplements I have personally tested alongside my hearing aids. A commission does not change what I report. If a supplement did nothing, the post says so.