Helping Dad hear: what our family learned when his hearing started to go
My father, Len, spent forty years as a land surveyor in New Mexico. He could hear a rattlesnake at thirty feet and a coyote across a mesa. By his mid-seventies he couldn't hear my daughter on the phone, and he'd started answering questions nobody had asked.
We didn't handle it well at first. He was embarrassed, I was impatient, and the TV got louder every month. Three years in, I've collected enough notes that friends with aging parents keep asking for them, so they live here now: the facts we needed, a few things we learned the hard way, and the questions to ask. I'm his daughter, not a doctor, and everything here is from our experience and the reading I did to keep up.
He's in the biggest group
Disabling means hearing loss of 35 dB or more in the better ear, the level at which adults can generally benefit from hearing aids.
| Age | Share |
|---|---|
| 45 to 54 | 5% |
| 55 to 64 | 10% |
| 65 to 74 | 22% |
| 75 and older | 55% |
Source: NIDCD quick statistics on hearing.
When I saw these numbers on the NIDCD's statistics page, I felt a little less guilty about missing the signs and a lot more annoyed that nobody had mentioned it at his checkups. More than half of people Dad's age have hearing loss bad enough that hearing aids would help.
The signs we missed
Looking back, they were all there for a couple of years before anyone said the words "hearing test":
- The TV volume crept up until my mother started watching in the other room.
- He stopped answering the phone and let it go to voicemail, then didn't check the voicemail.
- At family dinners he'd go quiet and smile at the wrong moments.
- He blamed everyone else for mumbling, especially my daughter and my sister.
- He got tired and grumpy in restaurants and wanted to leave early.
- He started skipping his Thursday coffee group, which he'd gone to for twenty years.
That last one worried me most. The National Institute on Aging's page on hearing loss points out that older people who can't hear well may become depressed or withdrawn because they feel frustrated or embarrassed about not understanding what's being said. That was exactly what was happening. It wasn't stubbornness. It was embarrassment, and the sheer effort of following along.
What finally worked to get him tested
Nagging didn't work. What did was making it about something he cared about. My daughter was getting married, and I told him I wanted him to hear the vows. He made the appointment that week.
A few other things that helped us, and that I hear from other families:
- Ask him to get tested "to have a baseline," not because something is wrong.
- Go with him. Two people remember more of what the audiologist says.
- Make the appointment for a morning, not after a long day.
- Let him be the one to describe the problem. My father told the audiologist things he had never told us.
What's on this site
Three longer pieces, each about one chapter of our last few years:
- The morning Dad woke up with one ear gone quiet, and why the next 48 hours mattered.
- What the big ACHIEVE study found about hearing aids and memory, and how it changed the way we talked about his hearing aids.
- The day he ordered hearing drops online, and how we checked them against his pill list.
If you're here because you're worried about a parent's memory as well as their hearing, start with this overview of how hearing loss and memory are connected. It's careful about what's proven and what isn't, which is more than I can say for most of what I found when I first searched at two in the morning.
Monica Feld lives in Albuquerque and helps look after her father, Len, who is 79 and a retired surveyor. She writes about what the family learned when his hearing started to go. She is not a medical professional.