Good evening, or good morning. Not feeling my best self today so we’re here instead
so I can be comfortable because this is my channel and I do what I want
[intro music]
So basically, I got new hearing aids and I hate them. There are m-many problems so let’s
start from the beginning. The last time I talked about my hearing aids was in my January
update which I’ll link somewhere up here, um, just saying hey there will be an update
soon and boy do I have an update for you. So I think right- just before we get started
I want to say that I am incredibly grateful for having audiology services that will treat
me for free, and give me the equipment I need for free, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t
criticise it. So I go in for a hearing aid upgrade because even though it’s “before
my time” um, because of my Visual Snow syndrome and difficulties I was having with communication
and understanding, we decided to upgrade my hearing aids to ones that have a volume control,
which yes, wanted that. And they said in that appointment um, oh you’ll have the choice
of two, you can have the brand that you already have with the same colour and everything,
or you can have a different brand which can connect to your phone, um, and I didn’t
make either of those choices then because I thought I would have time to think on it
and that’s sort of what they lead me to believe I guess? They didn’t tell me that,
they just said you have a choice but I never actually gave a choice. So that gets booked,
I get a text and a letter saying “hey, you’re gonna be seen by Dr So and so or one of his
team to get new hearing aids” and I was like yay cool. So that happened yesterday.
[sigh] So I go in, and the choice had been made for me to go with “the other brand”
which I was never told what it was, I had to read it off my hearing aids when I got
home. So here they are. They don’t have the hearing aid moulds on, more on that in
a second, so these are the Danalogic GN Ambio 77s. Uh, they- they just look like hearing
aids, because they are, uh, can you even see? Probably not, I’m not getting out of bed
because it doesn’t really matter. There’s a volume control on the back as well as a
button for modes. That’s essentially it. Fine. Not relevant for the rest of the tale.
So they’ve made the decision for me and if they had actually asked me I would have
gone with Phonak again because my hearing aid setup as of yesterday morning before the
appointment was perfect. The volume great, tinnitus reduction, great, sound quality,
fantastic. I just knew that it worked for me, so I didn’t- if it’s not broken, don’t
fix it. Says Max, getting an upgrade. Not the point. But no they changed it to this
other brand, and I was like ok fine whatever. And that wouldn’t really be a problem because
I don’t really have brand loyalty, I just want something that works, but these don’t
work for me at all. Have a little fidget, hold on. So we’re there in the appointment
and they do the thing where they stick the tubes in your ear to calibrate the hearing
aids, which I hate. Because for some reason, those tubes cause this ear just immense amounts
of pain. Uh, I don’t want to be a wuss about it but like it hurts. So I’m there in the
chair and I’m like wincing and stuff and I’m just trying to sit through it because
I want to “be good”. I don’t want to like cause any problems or issues or make
anything harder than it needs to be, but like sometimes I just can’t help flinching and
reacting because it hurts. But we get the things in, they play the sound at me, the
tubes measure the sound coming into the ear canal and then the computer says hey we’ll
put the hearing aids at this volume across these frequencies, and then he speaks and
I don’t hear what he said, he speaks again and I’m like “can we turn it up a bit”
and he gives it a couple of clicks, and he says something again and like I can technically
hear him, but I need to take a minute to process what he just said because my brain needs to
fill in the gaps of what I heard and what I didn’t hear and I’m like “Oh can I
have it up a little bit more please?” and he said “I don’t want to”. I’m sorry,
you don’t want to? And like I understand that you don’t want to have it up too high
because you might damage your hearing, but that’s literally what audiology do? And
they’re supposed to amplify it to a point where you can hear. So it’s pointless me
having hearing aids if they don’t amplify enough for me to hear properly. But he didn’t
want to turn it up, so I was like fine, we’ll- we’ll just come back for a tune up, and
then when he like disconnects it, the sound changes to what the hearing aids are actually
gonna give me, and oh god, it’s bad. Sorry for the dramatic reading style of that, but
it’s not good. It’s like my Phonak’s were Glastonbury, and these new ones are a
school disco. There is a horrible static sound that it’s playing which is louder than the
amplification it’s giving me, and it- it feels like a very electrical kind of static,
like when you’re watching an older analogue TV and it’s not quite in tune or you’re
listening to a radio that isn’t tuned properly. It’s like a proper like sssshhhhhh, but
from a speaker. And it is technically a speaker I guess, but it sounds like that. My Phonak
ones played a white noise for tinnitus reduction but I could barely hear it and it worked to
reduce my tinnitus. With these new ones I still have tinnitus, but I have a lot of static,
and the sound quality from what is amplified is like it's being spoken to me through a
toilet paper tube. Or sometimes depending on the noise, some sort of metallic tube.
I don’t know how else to describe it. There’s an awful like aux cord buzz. So I don’t
know if you’ve ever held an aux cord that’s plugged in and touched it and it’s gone
bzzzz. It’s like that constantly. It’s not amplifying anything to a usable volume
or quality for me, and the actual sound output that’s coming out, my Phonak’s were like
really like this, so they were like sharp, S’s were like Ssss, very like you know…
That, and I obviously adapted to hearing the world like that because I’ve had Phonak
headphone- headphones? I’ve had Phonak hearing aids for like 2 years now? 2019… about a
year and a half, so I’m obviously used to that, and then this new brand everything is
more rounded. Everything is softer, everything is muffled. And I don’t like it because
I can’t understand it. So that’ might just be a volume issue because they didn’t
want to turn it up as loud as I needed it to be so I didn’t like that. But the real
problem for me is the static and I figured out why. Because I have visual snow syndrome
and I’m seeing static constantly 24/7, playing the static gives my visual impairment a noise.
And my brain said NO. My brain absolutely said no. I could not wear them for more than
5 minutes without crying. I spent a good deal of yesterday crying, I was so upset. I’m
not really a crier, but I just, my brain couldn’t handle hearing what I was seeing. If- it won’t
make sense to many people unless you have visual snow you probably won’t understand.
But it literally just, it was like watching and listening to a TV that hadn’t been tuned
in to the channel right, showing my age, but it just, it was horrible. Not good. Uh, and
then I, I asked in the appointment, do they take the same batteries as my current ones?
Yes… No they don’t. Which I can understand because about 90% of the batteries coming
out of that place are the orange ones which I need which is the new ones, but only 10%
use the batteries that I was using, so I’m not mad at that, but also it means I don’t
have any batteries and I have anxiety about not having hearing aid batteries with me.
So yeah. That’s how that appointment went, It was very clear to me very quickly that
these hearing aids are not gonna work out for me so I sent audiology an email being
like hey can we fix this please? And they were like “ooh, sounds like you need a specialist,
we can get you in tomorrow morning” so that was this morning and they rang me and the
specialist was like yeah, no problem, these- you’re clearly quite upset by this, and
I was like yeah I am, and I don’t wanna be a dick about it, and she was like you’re
not being a dick about it, which is very nice and validating. They are posting me out some
programmed hearing aids that were the same brand that I just had, they’re posting them
to me. They’re not my exact old ones, but they’re gonna programme it and just send
them to me so I have something, which is good. Um, and I asked on the phone if they could
add a couple of clicks of volume because what the computer says it should be is never close
to enough and she said she’ll see what she can do but she’s not allowed to add too
much volume without the person being there, which I understand, but I’m just hoping they’ll have enough
to do something. That’s where we left it. Hopefully we can sort the problem out, but
yeah. I just wanted to actually- because yesterday I didn’t want to make this video, I was
like what can I make instead, but I just want to talk about the fact that I think me getting
my hearing aids right first time was very much not representative and if hearing aids
aren’t right, go back and get it right. Try and fix it, speak to whoever you need
to speak to, to see what can be done because if it’s not perfect and it’s actually
upsetting you, that’s not going to help you, and they are here to help. So on that
nice cheery note, don’t forget to like this video, drop a comment own below if you have
any questions for me based on what I just said, subscribe to my channel if you haven’t
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a new video. Videos go up every Saturday at 6pm UK time with at least one bonus video
every single month. See ya! [Blue Skies]