Snort…

Posted on by January 30, 2026

Been there, guessed that…

65 dB down in the left ear, 55 dB down in the right ear now. With TWO hearing aids…

Sigh…

Comments

Snort… — 32 Comments

  2. It’s a lot of fun when your tinnitus matches a couple of the frequencies they use for the test.

  4. I was sitting in the chair, intensely concentrating, and pushing the button when I thought I heard the beeps.
    A few seconds later the tech opened the door and told me they had not started yet.
    Every time I get my act together to start the VA process of hearing aids, something else comes up to derail the train.

    The Navy did have a hearing conservation program when I spent my youth in their enginerooms.

    • I need to proof read faster.
      Please change “did have a hearing ….” to “did not have a hearing…”
      Sigh.

    • I laughed way too hard at this! Sounds like something I would do. Fortunately my audiologist told me she give a sign when she started…

  5. My hearing loss is similar to yours. Two hearing aids, aye.

  6. I have hearing loss, but I blame it on being married for 45 years.

    Yes dear.

  7. In addition to the device that broadcasts TV directly to my hearing aids, which is wonderful (mute TV; I watch; she sleeps), VA gave me a doodad to put on my wife’s lapel. It would Bluetooth her speech directly to my hearing aids. What? Are you nuts?

  8. Started wearing hearing aids while still on active duty. At this point the left one sends the signal to the right so I can have some semblance of stereo. Left ear has almost no response, right is barely there without the hearing aid. I have one of the Bluetooth repeaters but it hasn’t seen much use. VA Rated at 90% all hearing loss and tinnitus.

  9. Not a fun club to be in, but welcome. At 73 years I too am in that loss range, sadly female voices in the higher frequencies are what I hear worse, thus being accused of not listening. Trust me, I am listening as close concentrated as possible, just not able to distinguish all words. Sigh!

    • Same age, similar problems. Left ear has major issues with higher pitches, and if I’m in bed on my right side, it doesn’t matter what my wife says–no way I heard it. The right isn’t quite as bad. Yet. No hearing aids, but I really should. Sigh.

      We’re fans of Brit and American mysteries, and I’m really happy with the closed captions. Trying to figure out Very North Britspeak (and God Help Us, Scottish accents) was hard enough without losing the women’s voices.

  10. Isn’t that the truth? I push the button before they turn the machine on.

  11. Got a mile or two from home driving to a new destination while relying on the talky GPS thingy to guide me since I can’t read the street signs until it’s too late to turn. GPS told me to…something something. Dammit, forgot to put in my hearing aids! Screw flying cars, I wanna take a nap while my car drives.

  12. I am starting to have more trouble hearing with background noise (to be fair, I always did, but it’s worse now). Every time I get a hearing test, perfect. I assume it’s a processing issue therefore, rather than a hearing issue.

    • Nerve damage does that. Protip: wear earpro before you get to the shooting station. Somebody has a hand-cannon and a target. In my case, a 44Mag in the bay just to my left. Yikes!

  13. The VA has been helpful with Hearing Aids, & a modest disability stipend, but it has not helped with the ringing,which I was told would be helped !! Damm noisy B-52″s.

  14. Yep, first person medical or engineer that figures out how to turn off tinnitus in the human brain will become an instant billionaire.
    Hope there is someone out there that figures this out soon as mine is so bad as to affect sleep let alone hearing clearly. If it were just loss, the hearing aids would help, they unfortunately don’t fix what severe tinnitus. Sigh!

  15. Dude at the gym dropped plates beside my head (benchpress bench). Pain, then my ears rang for a day after. And people wonder why I wear earpro at the gym as well as the range (double up at range – soft plugs, then big muffs over those).

    I started losing my hearing during college – loud concerts plus being inside the fuselage and wing while bucking rivets, without earpro. Eh? What was that?

    • Headphones and Pink Floyd. Not to mention wind noise from the MGB, and that was before I started shooting.

      A lot was attributed to otosclerosis. Right ear got fixed on the first try, but the left needed three before it stayed working. Having a miniature jackhammer working next to the inner ear didn’t help. (Having too much faith in the slightly less than fully-competent surgeon didn’t either. Should have changed docs after the first failure.)

  16. Sigh… I’m NOT the only one that punched it with no sounds (other than Tinnitus) and yes, I wish we’d known ‘better’ back in the day…

    Mine is also ‘aviator’s loop 3-8kHZ so no high pitched female voices/soprano singing. Sorry ladies!

    • OldNFO there aren’t any sopranos singing in that range unless they are part bat šŸ™‚ . The top operatic note used by sopranos is the F from Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria from the Magic Flute which is a high F (F6 I think in mathematical Notation, ~1396Hz in standard tuning the highest F on a piano keyboard). That’s essentially an octave below the start of the 3-8Khz range. However, there will be overtones in the 3-8Khz range from even lower down the scale so that will affect what you hear from a soprano voice.

  17. I remember being asked to check out the new stereo the power generation guy bought.
    All treble.

  18. So far my loss is limited to a mid range band which is down 20-30dB if I were a betting man. Comes from sitting in Computer rooms with the big machines and their 90dB fans with no ear protection.Twenty somethings are stupid and think they are immortal and invulnerable. Main issue I have is that the loss covers a large part of the speech frequencies so in a noisy environment (like say a restaurant) I can not easily pull conversation out of the background noise especially lower pitched women or higher pitched men. I figure I’m bound for hearing aids in the next 5-10 years

    • Why wait? Better to hear better now rather than five years from now when acquiring aids will be more expensive/troublesome.