The Price of Hearing

I just came back from the audiologist and learned how much my new hearing aids would cost.

$5,700. :jawdrop:

Fortunately health insurance is footing roughly half of the bill, but I’m still out close to 3 grand. @#%$ man, and I was getting so close to paying off my credit card debt too. :rant:

These are supposed to be the top of the line hearing aids though, something called the Destiny 1600 which is made by Starkey. Hopefully they’ll prove to be far superior to the ones I’m wearing now. Hell for 5700 bucks I better fricking believe they were sent from heaven.

One of the reasons why my social life is so nonexistent has been partly because I just couldn’t participate in conversations when it took place in noisy environments (which is basically everywhere). I could only go “Mmmmhmmm, uh huh, interesting, uh huh, mmhmmm” meanwhile not having the first bloody clue what the the person was saying. Sometimes I got lucky and could get away unscathed. Most of the time I didn’t. What surprised me about it all was that I thought it would be different once I went from analog to digital hearing aids. Nope. It was all still pretty much the same.

However, from what they say about these new hearing aids, they’re promising the moon. We’ll see. At the very least I’ll finally be able to get away from my current crook of an audiologist, who always found new and creative ways to pad her bills so I’d end up having to pay out of pocket for some of the repair expenses, even though my hearing aids were insured. Now I’m going back to the audiologist I had before her, a good guy who had always been straight with me, and whose warranty covered everything for 4 years and more (instead of the only two years that I had with this money grubbing ho). The only reason I went with another audiologist after him was because he only dealt with Starkey hearing aids, and they still did not have digital aids available for someone with my profound degree of hearing loss, even though it was what I wanted and I badly needed to replace the 6 year old analogs I’d been wearing back then. Oy, if I only knew, I would have bit the bullet and waited just a little while longer.

Now it looks like Starkey not only have digitals now, but even leapfrogged the competition with all these crazy new advancements to their technology. I’m still guarded about how effective the new aids will be, but for the first time in a long time I have hope. Maybe these new aids will finally be able to help me get back a part of my life that I’ve been missing for so long.