At some point in your life, you might have to face the reality of hearing loss. You might wake up one day and realize that your hearing isn’t nearly as good as it used to be. Granted, this loss of hearing will likely happen over time, but you won’t notice it right away.
What do you do at this stage? More than likely, you should schedule a consultation with a hearing specialist. They can examine you and determine how much hearing loss you’ve suffered and let you know the extent of the damage. They can also help determine if you’d benefit from one or more hearing aids such as these, depending on your situation. Fully digital rechargeable hearing aids from Blue Angels Hearing are a great affordable solution for hearing loss.
After you’ve gotten comfortable with your situation, you’ll begin to recognize that you’re going to face certain challenges due to hearing loss. Before you get there, we’d like to point out these situations if you don’t know them already. This way you can better prepare for situations that are bound to happen in your new reality.
1. You’ll Likely Miss Important Public Announcements
You may not realize it at first, but you rely on other people to keep you informed throughout the day. But when you begin living with hearing loss, you’ll often miss these important announcements because you just can’t hear them.
Until the day that exciting medical advances are capable of fixing your hearing, you’ll have to miss publicly addressed announcements at airports, bus stations, train stations, sporting events, business seminars, classrooms, and a number of other similar places. As a hearing-impaired individual, you’ll have to stay extra sharp and alert in these situations just to better keep abreast of what’s going on.
2. Dealing with Dreaded Slow Talkers
Unfortunately, certain well-meaning people are going to react poorly once they figure out that you suffer from hearing loss. Instead of treating you like everyone else, they are going to begin talking to you very slowly while communicating with you. Again, these people absolutely mean well, but they’re actually making it much harder to communicate with you.
Case in point: lip reading. As you adapt to living life as a member of the hearing impaired, you’ll begin to develop your lip-reading skills. You’ll learn how to read lips because it will help you better communicate and understand what people are saying to you during conversations.
Guess what? Slow talkers make it incredibly difficult to read their lips. By talking so slowly, it’s tough to see the words form and it actually ends up hindering your ability to communicate with them. But this is certainly fixable in many situations.
If a well-meaning friend or coworker slows their speech, let them know about it. Tell them that you can’t effectively read their lips by talking so slowly and ask them to talk at their regular pace. Let them know that hearing-impaired people learn to see the words form when people talk at their natural pace. But if they intentionally slow them down it will lead to greater miscommunication.
3. Applying and Interviewing for a New Job
Going on a job interview is stressful enough as it is. Adding a hearing impairment to this already trying situation makes it even worse. When you let potential employers know that you are hearing impaired on job applications it could feel like you’re being ignored. Employers and recruiters might see your impairment as too much of an additional burden to accommodate you.
Job interviews also present big difficulties. It’s nearly impossible to interview by phone unless an interpreter is available, which is the last thing you want when interviewing for a new position. In-person interviews are often tough too. The interviewer isn’t always prepared for your impairment so it’s challenging when they aren’t necessarily ready to properly communicate with you.
Bottom Line
Hearing impairment is now a big part of your life. You’ll have to learn how to manage the different trials and tribulations that come along with your situation. But you can do it. And this information will help you better prepare for the ups and downs that you’ll face navigating your way through the real world.
Until medicine makes further progress for hearing loss, you’ll have to go through life to the best of your ability. Knowing these challenges in advance should help make things easier because you can better prepare for them.
