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A few weeks ago, my left hearing aid started intermittently not working.

I tried various options for rebooting and charging and connecting it to various devices and so on. Sometimes it would work for a few hours, sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes I would wear it for a few hours of it not working, and then it would start working, without my having done anything.

(This is all complicated by the fact that it’s not obvious when it’s not working. My hearing loss isn’t severe enough that I can immediately tell when I put the hearing aids in. The only reliable way I’ve found to see whether it’s working is to run my fingers over the microphones; when it’s working, that makes a rustling staticky sound. When it’s not working, that makes no sound at all.)

A week or two ago, I contacted Phonak, the company that makes the hearing aids. They suggested rebooting, and said that if that didn’t work, I should contact my audiologist.

I rebooted, but that didn’t help. So I contacted my audiologist. He said I should replace the earwax shield, and if that didn’t work, I should call a certain number to [garbled phrase that I think was meant to be “schedule an appointment with an audiology assistant”].

I replaced the earwax shield, but that didn’t help. So I called the number and got a recording that said to leave a message and they would call back within 24 hours. I left a message.

Most of a week later (yesterday), having not received a call back, I called the number again, and got the same recording. I left a message again, but this time I noticed that the recording also said that if you have an “immediate” need for help with your hearing aids, you should call another number and schedule an appointment. I had ignored that before, because (a) my need wasn’t immediate, and (b) if it were, scheduling an appointment seemed like a not-very-immediate way to handle it. But this time, I figured that if they called me back, they would probably just schedule an appointment anyway. So I called the other number, and scheduled an appointment for today. (I had been assuming that I would have to schedule weeks in advance, as had been true for all my previous audiology appointments, but I guess that’s the difference between an appointment with an assistant and an appointment with a doctor.)

So today I went in, and the person I spoke with took the left hearing aid and replaced the wire on it. And now it works!

So far, anyway. But I hope and suspect it really was just a faulty wire; that would be consistent with my observations of the problem.