Symptoms of Hearing Loss

“….deafness cuts us off from people”, H. Keller

Symptoms

• • You can hear them speaking but can’t make sense of what they were saying.
  • Some people’s voices are consistently harder to hear than other peoples.
  • You believe that most people mumble.You understand speech perfectly in one-on-one conversations in a quiet room, but it becomes impossible to follow a conversation when background noise is present, or several people are talking at once. In fact, you’re the only one in the room who is struggling to hear.
  • You have an on and off ringing sound in your ears. 
  • You are hearing and responding incorrectly more often due to mixing up words such as hot for got, white for wife, pill for pick, snow for throw, book for took, ten for pen, gale for male.
  • You ask people to repeat themselves more often.
  • It’s hard to separate speech from noise. 
  • You are smiling and nodding when someone speaks to give the impression you are listening when in fact, you do not understand what was said.
  • You feel exhausted from the excessively high concentration while listening.
  • You don’t hear birds chirping anymore.

Hearing loss may be less noticeable to

• younger people because hearing loss is associated with aging.
• people with good health because hearing loss is often associated with declining health.
• people who had never worked in a noisy environment.¹¹