What do you consider "little benefit from HA?"

Hear Again said:
dd,

why do you keep saying that you agree with ci's for profound loss, but not severe-profound loss? remember, some people with severe-profound loss do not understand speech any better than those with profound loss. it's not the amount of residual hearing that counts -- it's speech discrimination.
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I *TOTALLY* agree with you. I have profound hearing loss in BOTH ears...yet I can hear on the phone or talk to people with my HA's before I started to lose more. My friend has a stable db loss, it hasn't changed for over 30 years. She can hear the higher frequencies that I couldn't. BUT...she has always struggled with understanding hearing people. We both went to the SAME school, grew up in the SAME environment (including hearing parents that knows a bit sign), etc, YET...she would never be able to carry a conversation fluently with a hearing person because her speech discrimination is just so poor (i personally think it's because not as much speech therapy as I did growing up). She is considering CI, but I warned her that it's just not going to improve as much...just like AlleyCat's situation, but it depends on the situation.

I have always felt that if someone can carry a conversation fluently (maybe with some struggling), with a hearing person or reading lips well, will do much better with a CI than someone that never really talk to hearing people, which in this situation he/she would have better environmental sounds if implanted.

As for Shel's brother...I was the same way. My younger half-brother is also deaf. Never wears hearing aids because it doesn't help him, even though we both have the same loss. He would do very poorly with CI because lack of speech therapy and training.
 
LadySekhmet said:
I *TOTALLY* agree with you. I have profound hearing loss in BOTH ears...yet I can hear on the phone or talk to people with my HA's before I started to lose more. My friend has a stable db loss, it hasn't changed for over 30 years. She can hear the higher frequencies that I couldn't. BUT...she has always struggled with understanding hearing people. We both went to the SAME school, grew up in the SAME environment (including hearing parents that knows a bit sign), etc, YET...she would never be able to carry a conversation fluently with a hearing person because her speech discrimination is just so poor (i personally think it's because not as much speech therapy as I did growing up). She is considering CI, but I warned her that it's just not going to improve as much...just like AlleyCat's situation, but it depends on the situation.

I have always felt that if someone can carry a conversation fluently (maybe with some struggling), with a hearing person or reading lips well, will do much better with a CI than someone that never really talk to hearing people, which in this situation he/she would have better environmental sounds if implanted.

As for Shel's brother...I was the same way. My younger half-brother is also deaf. Never wears hearing aids because it doesn't help him, even though we both have the same loss. He would do very poorly with CI because lack of speech therapy and training.
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exactly. your post proves what my first hearing aid audi told me -- that people with lesser degrees of hearing loss can have just as much difficulty (if not more) than those who have more significant degrees of hearing loss. it all comes down to one's ability or inability to discriminate speech. in my case, i was able to understand speech with a comtek fm system through direct audio input to my hearing aids for 4 out of the 10 years i had severe-profound hearing loss.
 
The reason the audiologist said that she couldn't do worse was because she was doing so badly! She wasn't understanding even simple words, how can you get worse than that?
 
faire_jour said:
The reason the audiologist said that she couldn't do worse was because she was doing so badly! She wasn't understanding even simple words, how can you get worse than that?
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i'm glad miss kat is doing so well with her ci. :D
 
LadySekhmet said:
I'm sorry, but I find the statement that just because you have a low sentence discrimination and the audiologist think that you would not significantly improve is a bunch of bullcrap.

I have 6% in my left ear...seriously. It's now more than 60%. I could not believe how POOR my sentence discrimination was. I thought it would be higher than that. After doing self-therapy and self-training, I was able to improve a lot.

Like some other people said and stuff...I HONESTLY think that anyone who can hear "well" with their HA's and can understand words by talking to people or people talking to them would do great with sentence discrimination. If I speak to someone with my HA's, face to face, I can understand pretty well, but if they turned their back, I would have a hard time. With the CI, it's so much easier.

I honestly think that if you really want to improve your speech discrimination, you'll do great if you do the training and have experience hearing people talk. With CI, I find that I can understand much more clearer because I was sorely missing the highs. If you don't talk to hearing people or don't really "listen" or can't hear lyrics of music at ALL (I mean if you seriously cannot follow lyrics), then CI is not for you.

I hope I made myself clear, but I'm not trying to put down your audiologist or anything, but to have the reason why you can't get CI is because your audiologist feels it will not improve...in a way it's putting you down.
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It's a good point. I actually was glad that my CI audi was being so upfront and honest about what she thought the end result would be for me, rather than being superficial and saying "oh yes, you'll understand everything everybody says" and so on .. Her being blunt in thinking I was not going to gain much really said a lot to me. I do talk to hearing people all day long, every day, every week (but I lipread far more than I use ASL these days) and my speech has improved, at least I think so, but I can't "understand" them for the life of me without speech reading except for my parents and my boyfriend. What you said about not being able to follow lyrics, I absolutely can't if I don't know the words, but I can somewhat if I do know the words. So I think I'm about 1/2 way in-between. HearAgain made a very good point about my word distinction scores, scoring as well as I did with no context which is unusual. So it's hard for me to know what to think here ..
 
alleycat,

yes. i'm literally scratching my head wondering how you were able to score so well with single words as opposed to sentences. (mind you, i *do not* doubt your deafness at all -- i'm just curious because in my case, i scored much better with sentence discrimination than i did with words. research has proven that this is the case for most people as well.)

having said that, i'm also glad that your audi was honest with you. at least she didn't lie to you about what you could expect from a ci only for you to end up being disappointed.
 
Hear Again said:
alleycat,

yes. i'm literally scratching my head wondering how you were able to score so well with single words as opposed to sentences. (mind you, i *do not* doubt your deafness at all -- i'm just curious because in my case, i scored much better with sentence discrimination than i did with words. research has proven that this is the case for most people as well.)

having said that, i'm also glad that your audi was honest with you. at least she didn't lie to you about what you could expect from a ci only for you to end up being disappointed.
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I'm not sure either. Maybe I just do better with phonemes (picking up individual parts of words) than overall listening to entire sentences. When I was referring in above post to understanding my parents and my boyfriend, I only understand portions of what they say. But usually enough to put it all together, even though I usually never understand the entire sentence. I agree, I'm glad the CI audi was that honest with me.
 
faire_jour said:
The reason the audiologist said that she couldn't do worse was because she was doing so badly! She wasn't understanding even simple words, how can you get worse than that?
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Hearing aids are not meant to give a person understanding.
 
jasin said:
Hearing aids are not meant to give a person understanding.
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they are if someone has lesser degrees of hearing loss. when i had moderately-severe hearing loss and wore aids, they allowed me to understand speech. even for 4 out of the 10 years i had severe-profound hearing loss i was able to understand speech thanks to my hearing aids and a comtek fm system.
 
Originally Posted by faire_jour
The reason the audiologist said that she couldn't do worse was because she was doing so badly! She wasn't understanding even simple words, how can you get worse than that?

as a rule, single words are more difficult to understand than sentences due to the fact that context can't be used like it can for the latter.
 
I'm coming into the thread late, but let me put in my comments.

I wore hearing aids for 27 years, since I was 10. I was able to understand speech for the most part. The last 6 years my discrimation went down. My right ear had almost no discrimation, but my left ear had enough to "function" at my job. The stress of hearing became so difficult that at that time, cochlear implants were the route to go. My speech discrimation of sentences was down to 1% in my right ear. I had no use of it. 1 1/2 years later my discrimation of sentences is up to the 94% in both ears. My words in isolation is up to the 80%. It takes a lot of work to get to this point. It is not a slap on and wear device. I think it depends on the individual person and the degree of loss when CI is the choice. It took me 5 years to make this choice.
 
Hear Again said:
Originally Posted by faire_jour
The reason the audiologist said that she couldn't do worse was because she was doing so badly! She wasn't understanding even simple words, how can you get worse than that?

as a rule, single words are more difficult to understand than sentences due to the fact that context can't be used like it can for the latter.
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very true. The HNT sentence you can use context clues to figure out the meaning.
 
Hear Again said:
they are if someone has lesser degrees of hearing loss. when i had moderately-severe hearing loss and wore aids, they allowed me to understand speech. even for 4 out of the 10 years i had severe-profound hearing loss i was able to understand speech thanks to my hearing aids and a comtek fm system.
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Sorry, but I disagree. Like, how am I going to understand chinese or japanese if I never learnt those languages and/or heard them before? A hearing aid no matter how good it is will not solve that problem.
 
vallee said:
I'm coming into the thread late, but let me put in my comments.

I wore hearing aids for 27 years, since I was 10. I was able to understand speech for the most part. The last 6 years my discrimation went down. My right ear had almost no discrimation, but my left ear had enough to "function" at my job. The stress of hearing became so difficult that at that time, cochlear implants were the route to go. My speech discrimation of sentences was down to 1% in my right ear. I had no use of it. 1 1/2 years later my discrimation of sentences is up to the 94% in both ears. My words in isolation is up to the 80%. It takes a lot of work to get to this point. It is not a slap on and wear device. I think it depends on the individual person and the degree of loss when CI is the choice. It took me 5 years to make this choice.
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You have years and years of trying to understand speech with hearing aids. That has obviously helped you significantly.
 
jasin said:
Sorry, but I disagree. Like, how am I going to understand chinese or japanese if I never learnt those languages and/or heard them before? A hearing aid no matter how good it is will not solve that problem.
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if you've never heard speech before, you have a point, but i'm not talking about that. i'm referring to people with normal hearing, a mild hearing loss or moderate hearing loss who *have* heard speech. for these people, hearing aids most certainly help them understand speech. if you don't think that's true, then how was i able to understand speech with my hearing aids all these years?
 
when i received my first pair of hearing aids at age 15 it must have been my imagination that i could actually understand speech much better than i could without them. hmmm. NOT.
 
Hear Again said:
if you've never heard speech before, you have a point, but i'm not talking about that. i'm referring to people with normal hearing, a mild hearing loss or moderate hearing loss who *have* heard speech. for these people, hearing aids most certainly help them understand speech. if you don't think that's true, then how was i able to understand speech with my hearing aids all these years?
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People with normal hearing do not need hearing aids as they are hearing. People with moderate hearing loss still need to know the language, spoken and also written in many cases, to understand it.

My girlfriend, who is deaf, is a fine example. She has hearing loss somewhere in-between profound and severe. Yet, she is still able to use hearing aids and can hear spoken language very clear with them. None of that helps much though as she never really learnt English. Her first language and Native language is American Sign Language.
 
jasin said:
You have years and years of trying to understand speech with hearing aids. That has obviously helped you significantly.
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I spent 7 years without any hearing aids and a profound severe loss. Some sounds I hear for the first time ever with cochlear implants.
 
i know someone who had been completely deaf for 30 years, received a ci and is doing wonderfully well. of course that isn't true for everyone, but it does happen.
 
jasin said:
People with normal hearing do not need hearing aids as they are hearing. People with moderate hearing loss still need to know the language, spoken and also written in many cases, to understand it.

My girlfriend, who is deaf, is a fine example. She has hearing loss somewhere in-between profound and severe. Yet, she is still able to use hearing aids and can hear spoken language very clear with them. None of that helps much though as she never really learnt English. Her first language and Native language is American Sign Language.
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again, i'm referring to people who have heard speech before.

some people (notice i said *some*) with a moderate hearing loss still have the ability to understand speech. they aren't completely deaf. in my case, i could understand speech without hearing aids as long as the person i was speaking to stood relatively close to me.

you're talking about those who are profoundly deaf. i'm not.
 
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