Month: April 2022

Restrictions and adjustments due to the COVID-19 pandemic are presenting challenges to everyone. But for those with hearing loss, those challenges include the ability to communicate effectively due to wearing masks or face coverings. That poses problems for about 60 million Americans who live with hearing loss, ranging from mild to severe, including deafness in… Continue reading Facemasks & the Challenges of Being Hearing Impaired

Diabetes in the U.S. Diabetes is a chronic disease that alters how the body turns food into energy. Most food is broken down into sugar (also called glucose) and released into the bloodstream. When blood sugar goes up, it signals the pancreas to release insulin. Insulin acts like a key to let the blood sugar… Continue reading Link Between Diabetes and Hearing Loss

America continues to fight COVID-19, and the top weapons in this fight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), are cloth face coverings. Be it a simple bandana fashioned to cover the nose and mouth, a non-medical mask, or a surgical grade model, the CDC says cloth face coverings may slow virus… Continue reading Masks for people with hearing Loss

Assisted Listening Devices that Seamlessly Interact with Bluetooth-Enabled Hearing Aids Can Re-Open the World to Those with Hearing Loss People who address and overcome any degree of hearing loss are likely wearing hearing aids that are Bluetooth enabled. And wearing a Bluetooth-enabled device represents a quantum leap from hearing aids of the past. People who… Continue reading Want To Hear Better In Almost Any Situation? Embrace Bluetooth!

Hearing loss can impact so many parts of your life without you realizing it—but not always for the worse. Growing up with a mother who had a moderately-severe hearing loss which eventually descended into a profound hearing loss, I often fail to realize how many behaviors it affected in myself and my other family members.… Continue reading The Power of Captions

For the regular-hearing person, the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA), which required all televisions with screens 13-inches or greater to display closed captioning by July 1, 1993, changed next to nothing in their television-watching experience. For people like me (those with hearing loss), however, our lives improved greatly. In recent years, movie… Continue reading The Best FREE Speech to Text Apps

February is heart 💗 month, and Cardiovascular awareness is at the forefront of the health community. Doctors will start to take extra care to remind us to take care of our heart, and what steps we can take to prevent heart disease, the leading cause of death for people in the United States. Heart disease… Continue reading How is our heart health connected to our hearing health?

The circle of life has rituals. There are ones people look forward to, like births, weddings, and milestones along the way, and ones that mark less joyous occasions, notably those that surround the failing health and death of loved ones. During the COVID-19 pandemic, methods of meeting the spiritual and emotional needs of seniors in… Continue reading The Changing Role of Chaplains During the Pandemic

Elizabeth, categorized as an older Baby Boomer since her birth year is 1953, took seriously the  social distancing recommendations issued by coronavirus medical researchers. She ended her previously-extensive social life. Instead of going to her part-time employment site, she was told  to start working from home. Instead of volunteering to make phone calls in a… Continue reading Social Isolation, Loneliness, and Hearing Loss in Older Adults

Larry and I recently received a call from a family member, asking us to bring home my otoscope to check out her ear. She explained that she was in the shower using a Q-tip when the soap slipped, she got flustered, and the Q-tip went in a little too far. Many of us know that… Continue reading Wax in. Wax Ouch!