Noisy restaurants, muffled voices: How hearing loss creeps up on us

[canetoad]

Loud noise travelled everywhere with Daryl Holmes. When he drove by, you could hear his car radio blaring. At dinner, he shouted. At night, his wife couldn’t sleep over the roar of the TV in the loungeroom. Any time she spoke to him from just a few feet away, he’d shoot back, “What did you say?”

Fifty years earlier, he’d been driving cranes in the steel industry. Then he’d worked in mines. He’d never worn ear protection, despite the cacophony of clangs, rumblings and the odd explosion that were part of a day’s work. So the signs ought to have been obvious. But by the time he was 73, Daryl had gone years without acknowledging his fading hearing. In fact, people take five years, on average, to get a test after the first signs of trouble. “You muddle along because you don’t understand the impact,” he tells us. “I was walking around in sublime ignorance.”

At least one in six Australians has a hearing problem. Most are 70 or older, by which age half of people have hearing difficulties. Restaurants become too loud to hear the soft voices of grandchildren. Conversations become stilted and awkward. Our ears are remarkable organs. Damage to their inner workings can’t be reversed. That damage can influence other areas of our health too. “What we’re now seeing over the last 10 to 20 years of research is that hearing loss has got such a strong knock-on effect on so many aspects of wellbeing,” says Barbra Timmer, president of Audiology Australia.

So how do we hear? What goes wrong with hearing as we age? And how can we get it back?

https://www.theage.com.au/national/noisy-restaurants-muffled-voices-how-hearing-loss-creeps-up-on-us-20250707-p5md5p.html

https://archive.md/bmbAm

[3catwoman3]

1. My husband spent almost 40 years as a pilot. He can't hear for shit.

He has hearing aids but he doesn't like them, so I, who have been soft spoken my entire life, have to make an extra effort to increase my volume and lower my pitch. If I happen to be facing away from him, I get called out on that, rather than him saying, "I'll hear you better if I'm facing you."

I'm tired of feeling like I bear all the responsibility for making sure he's hearing me.

[canetoad]

2. My hearing is pretty bad

But it's not a simple loss of volume - the muddled, muffled sounds are almost impossible to discern. I've often asked folk to slow down their speech - part of the problem is being able to parse what was said from the context it's in.

Other than that - write him notes.