JennyB

Here is a pic of my new hearing aids! Now that I FINALLY have everything!

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Jenny~B
http://fiestydeafanddisabled.wordpress.com

Deafness

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Bottesini

Artistic!

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Speedy Hawk

Wow colourful and artistic!

posts from hell

nice floor.

JennyB

It is actually a slat top coffee table ;-)

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Jenny~B
http://fiestydeafanddisabled.wordpress.com

Beowulf

Good. I was starting to feel sorry for the trained elephant or hippo or whatever.

djchur

I love the colour Jenny, I wish we could get coloured HAs in the UK instead of boring beige. Here they only issue coloured ones to kids!

AlleyCat

Are you not allowed to ask for colored ones? I am somewhat assuming there is a higher cost for the colored ones (I don't know as I've not had any - only the boring clear ones ) if you could pay the price difference between the boring beige and the colored, could you get them?

Sarfarigirl2011

OMG Jenny, they're so pretty!
I might get the Safari 900 but I'll see when I'll pick them up Monday.

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18 yr old girl with a moderate/severe in the right and severe on the left.
currently wearing purple Oticon Safari P 600s

whatdidyousay!

Cool! I did not know you could tubes in color too!

plasticdinosaur

Soooo pretty! Those are down right nifty!

drphil

JennyB: Well never thought I see the day VampireFreaks colour: Purple in BTE Hearing Aids!
Hope the new aids "assist" you.

Implanted Advanced Bionics-Harmony - Metallic Grey activated Aug/07

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Get Real:Implanted Sunnybrook/Toronto -Advanced Bionics-Harmony activated Aug/07

djchur

It seems to depend on where you live, in some areas the NHS will get adults coloured HAs, but not in my area. They issue everyone with beige and claim it is easier to just replace them when they go wrong rather than having to repair them! They also order HAs in bulk and seem to think that most people prefer beige.

Also at the clinic that I go to they only use Siemens HAs, so if you want to try any others it's just hard luck!

Sarfarigirl2011

well I used a Siemens hearing aid before when I was a kid and the sound quailty was excellent LOL (my Siemens are analogs)
I also tried another hearing aid brand which was Oticon in January 2005 *I was in 4th grade* and thought these are good!!!

I'm also going for the Oticon Safari hearing aid this year since my Oticon Gaia is 6 years old now and doesn't have a volume control like my Siemens does
my Siemens, lemme tell ya, they're a DIY hearing aid where you can change the volume without running to the audi's office to reprogramm *that's what I love about them*

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18 yr old girl with a moderate/severe in the right and severe on the left.
currently wearing purple Oticon Safari P 600s

Anij

Most of the people I know with BTEs have coloured ones - I only know a handful of people with beige (and it's because they're first time HAers, and their Audie didn't tell them what colours where available).

My BTE is a light brown (significantly darker than beige), only because the blue colour I wanted wasn't available at the time I was getting my HA (and the blue they did have, I didn't care for).

I do often use SuperSeals to change the colour of my BTE (&protect it from moisture/rain/sweat etc) - they have a number of different colours (last time I looked, no purple unfortunately)

Most first time HAers don't know that BTEs come in different colours, that they can request whatever colour they want, and that it costs the same for beige as any other colour they make... I actaully got my Audie to request a number of colour samples (and a colour chart that showed all available colours for various HAs they carried) for the display in the waiting area of their office - both so people would see that the HAs came in various colours & as a reminder for the Audies to ASK what colour people wanted their BTEs to be before ordering them

My audie's office said they had a huge increase in the amount of people requesting coloured HAs since the colour display was put up !!

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Hoh/Deaf ~ +120db deaf right , mild/mod flux left & APD
English & ASL ...PAH!!


Ignorance is NOT Bliss

Sarfarigirl2011

whoa that's some nutty stuff!
but colored hearing aids are an awesome fashion trend

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18 yr old girl with a moderate/severe in the right and severe on the left.
currently wearing purple Oticon Safari P 600s

posts from hell

really?? lets hope we dont have the saame coffee table.

Lissa

As a British person, I can too verify that the NHS don't really give out coloured HA's unless the hearing aid specifically comes in colour. I have a Spirit 3 and it comes in beige/grey. I was amused when they gave me a grey one, it was totally better than the beige one, which I've had all these years. Was nice to have a change. I don't know why the NHS lets Cochlear Implant Patients choose their processor colours but not the hearing aid colours.

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lissa, 23, profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss.
http://bioniclissa.blogspot.co.uk/

Speedy Hawk

UK adults do have colour aids and NHS have loads of them BUT you have to fight hard for it. You have to keep on on on on asking for one until then they will order it from NHS stock to deliver hospital you are at.

Kids are usually given out fairly easily.

Sarfarigirl2011

wow that's crazy
for me, there's colored hearing aids from where I am! LOL

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18 yr old girl with a moderate/severe in the right and severe on the left.
currently wearing purple Oticon Safari P 600s

JennyB

My last aids were purple as well! They were actually translucent purple which I think made them cooler - but they were bigger and the FM boots were black. The purple FM boots are a bonus here!

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Jenny~B
http://fiestydeafanddisabled.wordpress.com

djchur

Your matching coloured fm boots look really good too. So much better than my audio shoes with fm receivers attached, which make my boring beige, already large, HAs look enormous!

evil_queen_lisa

really the Naida's are bigger? your new ones look bigger in the picture. Could you post a pic of them side-by-side??
*EQL*

JennyB

Length wise they are about the same with the FM, but I can take off the boots super easily - unlike the Naida - so that makes them shorter. They are also skinnier.

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Jenny~B
http://fiestydeafanddisabled.wordpress.com

Sarfarigirl2011

yeah and I had FM boots that are boring grey LOL
BTW, love the hearing aids and they're so pretty!

I'm about to get mine somewhere this week

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18 yr old girl with a moderate/severe in the right and severe on the left.
currently wearing purple Oticon Safari P 600s

Lissa

These hearing aids look like mine except with a different name!!

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lissa, 23, profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss.
http://bioniclissa.blogspot.co.uk/

RoseRodent

Those are so cool, gives me some inspiration for mine. I still can't decide on colour choices.


I am fighting my hospital on the colour point at the moment, not so much because I want a nicer colour (even though I do) but that they issue beige hearing aids to people of every ethnic background and I just think that's so insensitive to say I know you are black but here's something that matches my skin colour.

They are actually required to offer you a choice "if available" and all the hospitals will write back to you if you complain telling you that they will give you a choice "where available" but the counter-argument is that if you always make sure to place 100% of your orders for beige and beige only, how will any other colour suddenly become available? If they accidentally pick up hearing aids in another colour from out of area they return them to the manufacturer to avoid them being placed in stock and therefore "available".

You aren't allowed to pay any upgrades for hearing aids, drives me potty, you can have the thing they give you or nothing at all. If it's not suitable, buy your own at 100% of the cost. You can't say can I pay you the additional money for the one that has features I really really need, it's take it or leave it. Almost all features are considered optional extras, they even deliberately deactivate features that hearing aids already have because they are outside the NHS remit, so even after they've paid for the hearing aid and it happens to come with certain wireless capability, they turn it off on purpose to stop you being able to use it, so that if that goes wrong you won't be back for a repair. It's "here's your hearing aid, it's set "right" for you, we checked it with REM that it's "right" (they seem to forget what exactly REM checks for, it checks the program matches the actual output not that the program matches the patient) come back in 4 years, if it seems too loud get used to it.

I've given up attempting to get a hearing aid which doesn't make a terrible noise in my ear for most of the day. They are now accusing me of making the noise up to get a "better" hearing aid (it won't be better, it will still be mid-range and beige, it will just be a Phonak mid-range beige health service model instead of a Siemens mid-range beige health service model) or have almost extended as far as that if I'm not making it up it must be tinnitus and I should avoid wearing my hearing aids if they "give me tinnitus".

Funny that ONLY the Siemens model gives me this "tinnitus" and that my husband and my audiologist have acutally heard this "tinnitus" come out of the hearing aid, but with her boss in the room the audi backpedalled on having heard the noise because she's a flake. I've worn lots of other hearing aids, I've been in Phonak private hearing aids for 3 weeks or so and no "tinnitus" - funny that! Only wish I could decide not to pay that portion of my insurance given that I am not getting anything back from it and others are, that's the annoyance, the pretense that they are providing everyone "who needs one" with a hearing aid, but never mind if it's any use, they've explicitly told me not to wear mine, but I will be included in the statistics as having been provided with one so everyone who needs a hearing aid has been provided with one for free. Thanks, thanks a lot. If they stopped issuing hearing aids so badly that 50% of owners keep them in a drawer then perhaps they could issue hearing aids that are of actual USE to half as many people. A hearing aid which is on your ear is more use than any hearing aid which you keep in a box, and the beige is one of the biggest reasons people don't actually wear them, colour is not a frill and a fancy, it's what gets those hearing aids out of the box and into the lugholes.

The coloured ones actually do not cost a penny extra even to the health service, they just don't want the bother of administration to order several colours, if you order 1,000 beige and issue everyone with beige then if they need a replacement you can quickly knock out a beige. And you can meet waiting list targets because if they ask for black and you only have beige you can still give them beige and say you have issued something. They don't even issue colours to kids in my area, they offer a choice of 3 colours of earmould instead - pink, blue or plain. Not for adults, though, we have to have clear even though they are being made in the same lab.

And that, my transatlantic pals, is why Brits still complain about "getting free hearing aids" because the hearing aid is chosen for you before you even show up for the test, everyone will be getting a Siemens Reflex (model is area-specific, some areas issue other models but usually ONLY that model), it's just a case of whether it's an L, an M, a DP or a DSP, they are often worse than useless, the most common complaint of the mild-moderate user is they hear better without their hearing aid. But we all have to pay into the pot so that hearing aids can be dished out to people who don't wear them and everyone can pretend that the NHS "gives everyone free hearing aids".

Oh, and they can swap them whenever they please, so even if you invested in a streamer or something and you were lucky enough to be able to get them to program it for you (usually costs a lot of money, you are required to buy the streamer through them at minimally 50% more than market rate to cover all future programming and you cannot get them programmed privately elsewhere) then if they stop doing business with that manufacturer they can take your Siemens aids back from you whenever they like and give you a pair of Resound and you have no say in that, never mind your investment, never mind if you got the Siemens perfect after years of trying, they give you something else when they feel like it.

Um... sorry that's slightly off topic!!

Lissa

Some GOOD points there RoseRodent, most of it is true. They only use one brand of hearing aid as well. I had an unaided hearing test before they programmed my HA for me.

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lissa, 23, profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss.
http://bioniclissa.blogspot.co.uk/

deafdyke

If they promoted them I think that the percentage of people only requesting beige would be limited to those with old age loss who think a HA makes them look "old"

RoseRodent

Not sure about that because beige is the colour that people think makes them look old! Most older folks buying their own here seem to take silver to match hair rather than to "match" (ha ha) skin. Is anyone that colour who doesn't have serious liver disease?