Customized Solutions: Matching Hearing Aid Technology to Lifestyle Needs

Jordan Pysz / iFoundMyDoctor.com
Mike and Colleen Fillian

By the time a younger Mike Fillian broke free of his family’s farm, his ears had been “bombarded” by so much noise for so long that the foundation for a significant sensorineural hearing loss had already been laid. “I can distinctly remember coming into the house for a drink of water after being out on the tractor for an hour or two and everything just being so quiet in the house,” says Mike, 69. “That’s how loud it was out on that tractor.” The fact that Mike later went to work in a glass factory and then a power plant didn’t help matters. By the time he’d earned the college degree that allowed him to escape those noisy environments and work a desk job as an engineer, the bulk of the damage to his hearing was done. “It was probably 15 years or more that I was exposed to all those loud noises,” Mike offers. “And even though it wasn’t until later in life that I noticed the hearing problem, I probably spent 10 years struggling with it, asking people to repeat themselves and things like that. “What I know for certain is that it was somewhere in the mid-2000s that it stopped being fun for me to go out with friends for a beer or whatever on a Friday or weekend night because I could hardly hear what anyone was saying anymore. “And meeting new people, that was just painful because it was hard for me to talk to anybody, to be able to hear them and listen to them. Finally, in 2013, my wife said, Please go have your ears checked. It was after that that I first got hearing aids.” Diagnosed with a significant upper-frequency hearing loss, the kind that makes it difficult to hear women’s and children’s voices, birds chirping or devices beeping, Mike was fit with what he says were “good hearing aids.” But they weren’t good enough to significantly improve his ability to hear clearly in meetings at work or crowded restaurants, so when he lost one after it fell out of his pocket following a medical exam, he refused to spend big money on a pair of replacements. That just made a bad situation worse, sparking a period in which Mike began to avoid social settings out of fear his inability to hear clearly would lead to embarrassment. Then his wife, Colleen, read an article in Florida Health Care News about someone with similar issues. “The article was about a man who grew up on a farm and then worked in a factory just like Mike,” Colleen remembers. “This man had struggled for years just like Mike, but he found an audiologist who helped him, and I said, Mike, this is the audiologist we’re going to see.” That audiologist is Drianis Duran, AuD, of Gulf Coast Audiology, and it didn’t matter to Mike and Colleen that her Fort Myers-based practice is nearly an hour away from their Port Charlotte home, both were confident Dr. Duran could help.

Jordan Pysz / iFoundMyDoctor.com
An article in Florida Health Care News prompted Mike and Colleen to travel from Port Charlotte to Fort Myers for the care they needed for Mike’s hearing problem.

The Real 1

“The first thing we did with Mike, of course, was evaluate his hearing, and from that we learned that he had a noise-induced high-frequency hearing loss,” Dr. Duran explains. “The next thing we did was evaluate the hearing devices he already had.” Dr. Duran then inquired about Mike’s lifestyle and asked him and Colleen to detail the frustrations they were experiencing because of Mike’s hearing issues. “I use all of that information to make a recommendation in which I strive to match the technology of the hearing devices with the patient’s lifestyle,” Dr. Duran explains. “In doing that with Mike, I recommended the Oticon Real 1 hearing aids.” In addition to reducing background noise, the Real 1 contains a microphone that allows the device to pick up sounds from anywhere around the wearer, and it automatically balances loud noises and soft sounds. The Real 1 also contains Bluetooth® technology, which allows the wearer to stream audio from electronics such as a computer, television or smartphone into their hearing aids so those sounds can be heard clearly. Mike and Colleen didn’t think twice about accepting Dr. Duran’s recommendation. “After all I’d been through with the two previous sets of hearing aids, I was pretty reticent about getting new ones,” Mike admits. “But all that changed in an instant after Dr. Duran performed her testing and we started talking about what hearing aids would be right for me. “At that point, my wife and I both had this incredible level of confidence that this was going to work out very well for us because we were both very confident that Dr. Duran was absolutely the right person to help us resolve this issue. “We knew this was the right way to go, and at our next appointment, after Dr. Duran fit me with the new hearing aids and made a couple of adjustments, well, I just can’t tell you how remarkable the outcome was. “At one point, she walked over to a far corner of her rather large office and spoke softly into the corner using words that used to be hard for me to understand. But with these new hearing aids, I could hear everything she said clearly with zero problems. “Then she walked way down the hall and started asking me questions, again in a soft voice, and it was just remarkable how well I could hear her. So, my wife and I are just elated with how fantastic this has all worked out for us.”

The Ultimate Test

Mike was fit with his Oticon Real 1 devices on August 9. A couple of days later, he and Colleen took a weekend trip to West Palm Beach, where Mike put the hearing aids to what he considered the decisive test. “We stayed at an Embassy Suites, which has a very large atrium and a lounge in the center of the atrium, and we sat down for dinner during happy hour at a table right by the bar where everyone was ordering drinks,” Mike explains. “It was very noisy with a lot of background noise and chatter, but as we sat there, I was able to hear everything Colleen was saying without any issues, which was just amazing to me. I can’t tell you how much confidence that has given me. “I feel so much better about being in social settings now, and I’m much more engaged in those settings. I used to listen and not respond in those settings, but now I’m getting involved in conversations again because I can hear again. “And that’s all thanks to Dr. Duran. She really does care about people, and I encourage anyone with a hearing problem to go see her because she takes great satisfaction in helping people hear clearly again, and she does a remarkable job of it.”