Hearing Loss LIVE in Five: Beach Time

#HearingAids and beaches are a concern for many with #HearingLoss. Be #HardofHearing friendly and enjoy the beach using many other strategies to help alleviate struggles of communication.

Here's our accompanying blog posts to this subject:
https://hearinglosslive.com/gestures-sign-language/

Find a transcript to this podcast on our BuzzSprout site:
https://hearinglosslivepodcast.buzzsprout.com/

Transcript

Welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! in Five. 

Julia: Hello and welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! in Five. We hope you are having a great summer and you are remembering to like, share, subscribe, check out our workshops and recorded classes at hearinglosslive.com. Remember, we will be on Google Meet with live classes in the fall. So join up for our newsletter. You can be the first to know when those classes are going to roll out and what times will be available. We love our live classes. They help us so much with lipreading and communication concepts. And communication concepts is key this summer, I think in all of your events. We talked cars so far. But you know, I'm a beach goer. I love to be at the ocean, the lake, in a kayak, on the beach, wherever, in a boat. I am happy as a bumblebee there. But communication can be a little different when you have a hearing loss at the beach. Lots of different options when you wear hearing aids, right. Chelle talk to us about what that kind of looks like sometimes.

Chelle: I would be paranoid to wear my hearing aids at the beach. They're six, $7,000 right? Who wants to mess up their hearing aids at the beach? Some people are with hearing loss fear going to the beach and will say no. Because they don't know how they'll communicate without hearing aids. One of the things I've done is made sure I can always communicate with or without my hearing aids. And we covered that in being comfortable with hearing loss, a past topic. If you don't want to wear your hearing aids, there are options. There's gestures, making sure people are close to you and speaking at you. Following the three golden rules. Get my attention. Face me. Be within-- I'm going to say at the beach three feet or less, because I need to be closer you to be closer without my hearing aids. And if you don't want to be at the beach without anything, but you really want to go to the beach, one of the things I have suggested is a Pocket Talker or a Mino, Mino. Not sure how we say that one, but they are amplifiers, personal amplifiers. They are $200 and under, depending on where you get them, and they they will help you hear, I personally like the Pocket Talker with my severe hearing loss, because it has more power. If you don't need as much power as I do, you can get that Mino so you can use that for your communication. If you want to be at the beach and don't want to be there with hearing aids, but aren't comfortable being without hearing aids yet. Hearing partners, they can be pretty good about making sure in that special instance or situation to do their job. Oh, yeah, duh, you know, I need to do this, so I will let Julia go now. 

Julia: Yeah, it's and, you know, depending what time of the year you're going and what day of the week, it can get busy at the beaches, right? And it's loud, and there's lots of kids, and there's lots of, you know, if it's a dog friendly beach, there's lots of dogs running and barking and people doing all sorts of stuff. So again, this is a little bit of the is there some space for quiet time, right? Just enjoy the atmosphere, the time out, the you know, maybe what wave sounds you can get, because that's one of the reasons I love the ocean is the wave noises are relaxing for me, and even the lake slapping. So that's just my thought. Come up with a plan. I think I say that quite often, in a lot of our stuff, come up with a plan. Be ready to have an idea. Gestures. Gestures is a past topic of ours that's very important. Learn some gestures that you know, whether they're a sign language gesture that you can easily remember, or just a regular gesture, you know, Hey, look over here. Oh, look at that person. You know, use body language with those gestures. It's, it's one of the things we teach in our classes how important that is. We Oh, Chelle, had a thought, I think.

Chelle: Yeah. Yeah, only that. Our latest blog is all about planning ahead with hearing loss. That's just not it's not just what you wear, it's how you'll hear. So definitely talk to your hearing communication partner about how to make the situation ideal for both of you. 

Julia: Love it.

We hope you're having a great summer. 

Bye!