A few weeks ago, my left hearing aid started intermittently not working.<\/p>\r\n
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\u2019t. Sometimes I would wear it for a few hours of it not working, and then it would start working, without my having done anything.<\/p>\r\n
(This is all complicated by the fact that it\u2019s not obvious when it\u2019s not working. My hearing loss isn\u2019t severe enough that I can immediately tell when I put the hearing aids in. The only reliable way I\u2019ve found to see whether it\u2019s working is to run my fingers over the microphones; when it\u2019s working, that makes a rustling staticky sound. When it\u2019s not working, that makes no sound at all.)<\/p>\r\n
A week or two ago, I contacted Phonak, the company that makes the hearing aids. They suggested rebooting, and said that if that didn\u2019t work, I should contact my audiologist.<\/p>\r\n
I rebooted, but that didn\u2019t help. So I contacted my audiologist. He said I should replace the earwax shield, and if that didn\u2019t work, I should call a certain number to [garbled phrase that I think was meant to be \u201cschedule an appointment with an audiology assistant\u201d].<\/p>\r\n
I replaced the earwax shield, but that didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\r\n
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 \u201cimmediate\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019s the difference between an appointment with an assistant and an appointment with a doctor.)<\/p>\r\n
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!<\/p>\r\n
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.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gadgets","category-medical"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21065"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21066,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21065\/revisions\/21066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}