Thank you for this article.

my story is that I've been hard of hearing for all of my life (I'm now 61).

As a child, I paid close attention to what the teacher was saying, as best I could. And I went on paying attention to what others were saying, developing my listening skills.

There are many people in my family who have deafness both from when they were young, to those who are in their senior years.

My father was one of those with hearing loss, but he wasn't interested in doing anything about it, despite my mother's efforts to encourage him to use the hearing aids he had.

I suspect because I felt I was 'managing', I left the idea of hearinbg aids to assist until I was about 55, well after my poor father had gone from deaf, to having dementia, and then a couple of years later, his death.

Now I have hearing aids, and I LOVE being able to hear everything! I don't want to die, never hearing what I want to hear, and with dementia!