Rebecca A Withey: When I’m asked, ‘does your hearing aid help?’ An honest answer (BSL)

Do you wear a hearing aid? I do, yes.

Does it help?

Well… yes. But also no. And sometimes it helps in ways I didn’t exactly ask for.

First of all, a hearing aid is not a magic wand. It does not restore hearing in the way spectacles correct vision.

You don’t suddenly go from “pardon?” to “ah yes, the rustle of leaves in high definition.”

Think of it less as correction and more as amplification with opinions.

Whatever hearing you’ve got, a hearing aid takes it, boosts it, and sends it back to you like a very enthusiastic radio that hasn’t quite decided what counts as important.

The experience of wearing a hearing aid is deeply personal. Some people swear they can’t live without theirs. Others feel like they’re being personally assaulted by every sound in existence.

I was firmly in the second category for years.

Too loud. Too tinny. Too sharp. Headaches. Itchy ears. Sore canals. And a constant sense that the world had been turned up to settings I did not agree to.

So I resisted for a long time. My hearing aids lived in their box, which developed a thin layer of dust and resentment.

What nobody tells you—or at least what nobody told me—is that hearing aids don’t just make things louder. They make everything equally eligible for attention.

There’s no priority setting for “human voice over the sound of a car engine” or “important conversation over an indicator click.”

It’s just sound on top of sound.

So in the car I hear the engine clearly, but lose the sound of my children chatting (or bickering) in the back seat.

And if I’m playing music on my phone but someone starts talking in the room, the music simply disappears.

Then there’s the guessing game of what the sound actually is.

Is that a bird? Or someone whistling? Or just my hearing aid inventing wildlife?

I once spent a very sincere amount of time trying to locate a “confident robin” that turned out to be absolutely not there.

There’s also the category of sounds that impersonate other sounds.

One time I responded to what I thought was someone shouting my name, only to realise it was a dog barking in the distance. I answered both. Just in case.

And then, in a meeting I once called out for someone to “come in” after hearing what I thought were knocks at the door. It was actually just someone clearing their throat. Awk-ward!

I remember my (also deaf) sister telling me how she once panicked at the sound of her baby crying and rushed into the nursery, only to find it was her older daughter enthusiastically singing.

(To this day, my niece has never quite forgiven her Mum for comparing her singing to wailing. Oops.)

And when too many sounds arrive at once, they stop being separate things and become one single electrical haze.

Like the world has been tuned to static and I’ve lost the channel entirely. Nothing makes sense.

I could be trying to translate a song for a signed performance, and nothing makes sense anymore, it’s just a cacophony of sound.

Then there are the unpredictable technical moments. When the hearing aid cuts out at exactly the wrong time.

Or when wax blocks the tube and reality becomes muffled, like someone has gently placed a cushion over the entire world.

Or when wind hits the microphone and I am apparently inside a storm while everyone else enjoys a perfectly normal day.

And then sometimes the hearing aid works too well.

I hear shoes clacking on the pavement in forensic detail. I hear plates being stacked with the enthusiasm of a small disaster.

And the kettle—why is the kettle roaring like that? It’s just boiling water.

Sometimes my hearing aid turns the volume up so much that I overcompensate and start speaking too loudly.

Then I get told I’m shouting. Often by my embarrassed teenager who still isn’t convinced that I am indeed a ‘cool’ Mum…

And don’t even get me started on the microwave. The microwave doesn’t beep when it’s finished, does it? It screams at me.

But yes, sometimes a hearing aid helps.

Sometimes it pulls speech sounds out of noise just enough for me to follow a bit more of a conversation. It can give me clearer lip-reading cues and alert me to sounds that I wouldn’t otherwise know existed.

But it doesn’t make me hearing. It isn’t a translator or a communication tool. It doesn’t turn sound into meaning. It turns sound into… opportunity. With occasional plot twists, of course.

So yes, my hearing aid helps me access some sounds in the world.

Just not in a clean, predictable, “everything is now clear” kind of way.

More in a:
“this is useful… this is chaos… that might be a bird… yes you are absolutely shouting… and no, I still don’t know why the microwave is yelling at me either” kind of way.

By Rebecca A Withey

Rebecca A Withey is the Assistant Editor for The Limping Chicken. She is also a script writer, BSL consultant and creative artist based in the Midlands. Rebecca is a Deaf, bilingual BSL user.