Her hearing has been pretty good as we age, but she had a bad ear infection a couple years ago and lost a lot of the hearing in her right ear, as illustrated by this audiogram.
The way this chart reads is the bottom axis represents frequency. The higher the sound, the farther right on the chart. The left axis represents volume. The farther down on the chart, the louder the sound has to be for each frequency to be heard. For normal hearing on a young person, all the lines would be pretty much horizontal and within the 10 to 20 range.
For our purposes, there are a couple of extraneous lines, the ones with the dotted lines. The two important ones are the solid ones, the “X”s for her left ear and the “O”s for her right ear. Her left ear can hear almost everything within the normal range of hearing. The volume has to go up a little for her to hear the higher pitched sounds. Her right ear drops off pretty fast. The volume has to be unrealistically loud for her to hear any high pitched sounds out of her right ear. An odd result of disparity is that pretty much everything she hears seems to be coming from her left. She has lost the ability to hear something and look right at the direction it’s coming from.
Today she got a hearing aid in her right ear. We got the audiologist to run the audiogram again; hearing aid in. It came out like this.
There are still two dotted lines to try to ignore, but an additional line of importance superimposed; the “A”s. That is how her right ear hears now, practically the same as the left ear; the “X”s.
She spent the rest of the day marveling at how much stuff she could hear, how she could tell which direction a sound was coming from, and how much we could turn down the television and she could still understand the dialog. Great fun.
Here is how it looks when she’s wearing it.
Hard to tell.
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