Growing Up With Hearing Loss: Trey’s Story
Trey, a Jacksonville Speech & Hearing Center patient for over 20 years, shares his experience of growing up with hearing loss and explains how digital hearing aids have improved his social life and education.
Q: Trey shares his experience as a JSHC patient for 20+ years
Trey: My name is Trey and I am a client of the Jacksonville Speech & Hearing Center. I’ve been going there since I was 2 years old and I’m 26 years old now. I’ve gone through their speech therapy, I’ve gotten hearing aids from them and they are all excellent. I enjoy going there. Dr. Mattson, my current audiologist at the Jacksonville Speech & Hearing Center, is excellent. She actually had given me my most current set of hearing aids. They work excellent, the hearing aids I have now. With this (Bluetooth) I can answer the phone through that.
Q: Trey explains how hearing aid technology helped him as a student.
Trey: The first set of hearing aids I had were analog, and now the ones I have are digital. The digital ones seem to be a little bit better. Now, with these hearing aids, they actually have Bluetooth I can connect to my cellphone or a microphone. With the microphone, if I’m in school, the teacher or the instructor can wear the microphone, and it helps me to hear the instructor better. There is a device that I can connect to the TV so I can hear the TV better. If anyone has that type of hearing loss, it’s very helpful.
Q: Trey explains how speech therapy and hearing aids have improved his life.
Trey: When I first started going there I was going through speech therapy. It has really helped me out. Now I can hear better, I can speak better, and with the hearing aids they gave me, I can hear better. As the years went on, I can speak better. That really helped me out quite a bit.
Q: A father shares his thoughts on parenting a child with hearing loss.
Trey’s Father: Trey has been going to the Jacksonville Speech & Hearing Center since he was 2 years old. A lot of you may be asking why we decided to take him to speech and hearing. We noticed in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, there was not a lot of attentiveness. He wasn’t paying attention and even though we would speak to him, he wouldn’t respond. We decided to go on and have his hearing tested.
Obviously as a parent what you need to do is watch your child, make sure that when you are speaking to them they are actually responding to you, and they are responding not only with their eyes, but with their ears. They are turning and those kinds of things.
It is not a stigmatism to take your child to get hearing aids, it’s no different than taking them to get glasses. You need to pay attention to your child at an early age to make sure they get the attention and the help they need early on because it not only affects their hearing, it affects their speech. Their speech, obviously, is everything to them, especially when they get older, With Trey, we just noticed it early on and as a parent, you need to stay focused on your child.
Q: How having hearing tests and services on-site under one building provides convenience.
Trey: That is very helpful to me because that way I don’t have to drive to multiple places to get the testing done. They have their own closed booth for hearing tests and that is very helpful to me because I don’t like having to go all over town just to get that done.
Q: What digital hearing aid technology is important.
Trey: With digital technology, they can take the hearing aid and connect them to the computer to fine tune the hearing aids to match someone’s hearing loss a lot better than the analog ones. The analog ones take a lot of work to fine tune them but with the digital ones, it is a lot faster, better, and more accurate.
Q: Young people and hearing aids.
Trey: If someone has hearing aids, it is good to always be positive and not let other people bother you. Having hearing aids is just like having glasses. People wear glasses, some wear hearing aids, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Q: Having your ear mold and technicians on-site at JSHC provides convenience.
Trey: It is always good to have a technician right there at the Jacksonville Speech & Hearing Center because then you don’t have to go all over town to have it done. You don’t necessarily need to see your audiologist for your ear mold, but since there is always a technician available at the Jacksonville Speech & Hearing Center, if there is something wrong with the ear mold or the tubing, you can just have them fix it, sometimes in just 15 minutes.
