ash345, I hope you are getting used to your new hearing aids, it does take long time to get used to them specifically if you have not used them before or for a while, I was born normal hearing and started losing my hearing in both ears over 12-13 years back and within a year or so my hearing was pretty bad, I did not wear hearing aids until like less than 2 years after it started to get bad and the first few days were nightmare, very slowly things started to get better, hearing my own voice was horrible and slowly I got used to it, I can not believe 2 years of hearing loss drove my brain down the drain, I had to go through all noise to let my brain adjust, there was no boards like this before and no support of any type and the audi I was seeing was not good at all, I don't know how I kept going just because I wanted to advance my career and knew I could not do that without hearing better, I forced myself to use the phone again with hearing aids using every single headset that came out in the market after getting scared of using it for few years, the use of the hearing aid and the phone helped my brain (the hearing cortex) to keep remembering all of these sounds that I heard before my hearing loss, then when I got my CI 4 months back, my results is outstanding which due mostly to the fact that I kept using both hearing aids for over 10 years none stop and used the phone no matter what, that's improved my brain perception to sounds, so it seems that you train your brain on all of these sounds (you call them noise when in fact they are not) and keep going and going, if you stop and rely on living on your silent world then later on when you need a CI your results will not be much promising, the more you use your hearing aids now the better for your brain to keep memory of sounds, otherwise if you stop your brain will use that hearing cortex for something else and you will never or will have a hard time knowing what the sounds you are hearing are for.
Hearing aids are not like eye glasses, you put them on and then wow you hear like a normal person, unfortunately it does not work this way, my best advise for you to keep working with your audi and try to get a better fit, keep your hearing aids on all the time, by a year or two from now you will get used to these sounds, trust me.
Decide what you want in your life from now, you can't go or live half way, one day have this on and the next you want to live in a silent world, if you want your hearing aids to work for you then give it much more time, it progress very slowly, do not judge it now, give it at least a year of full work.
Speech understanding: it will come slowly as soon as your brain start scans out the background sounds (or noise), try to train your brain/ears on relating what you hear now using the lip reading, take your time.
The one time I did, was when my partner looked at me and said, "I love you" while she signed it... i was glad then... but other than that... i haven't had many of those...
