Unilateral hearing loss

[LynJ]

We were at Disney in December. Kiddo had a fabulous time. Undiagnosed hearing loss at the time.

We get back in January and were informed that she failed her school hearing test. After a battery of tests, she has mod-severe unilateral hearing loss in high pitches in one ear. Lower pitches are on the low end of normal. Other ear is perfectly fine.

She will likely be getting a hearing aid to help, especially in school and background noise situations. At the moment, she has adapted extremely well (to the point that even her teacher was stunned to find out about the hearing loss). She can hear very well in quiet environments, but background noise and sound location are a problem.

We're returning in December, and she will likely have a hearing aid at that time. Since this will be a new level of background noise (with what will be a fairly new hearing aid), is there anything we should particularly watch out for? We don't want her to be overwhelmed, but at the same time we don't want her not wearing her hearing aid and missing out on things.

(And yes, I'll explore this with the audiologist once she gets a hearing aid and starts adapting to it, but I thought I'd feel out the Disboards to see if you guys have any experience/advice with this.)

 

[browncats]

Let her do what she feels the most comfortable with. Don't force her to wear the hearing aids if the noise is making her miserable and it might because WDW is a very noisy place with a lot of auditory stimuli. Request to sit up front or near the speakers for shows, get an Assistive Listening System device from GS if you really want. They use headphones or an induction loop (ask her audiologist about getting one) to amplify the sound in her hearing aids.

And to be honest, she won't be missing out on much if she doesn't have her HAs in. Disney is still awesome even when you can't hear everything. Maybe even better when you don't have to listen to the screaming babies

 

[seashoreCM]

Generally, any situation or area (notably fireworks shows) when some folks are tempted to wear earmuffs or ear plugs, hearing aids should be taken off or their volume turned down. Persons with small hearing aids can also wear earmuffs.

 

[minnie mum]

DH wears bilateral hearing aids. His will automatically shut off if noise levels reach a set point. Don't know if your DDs will also. While I find many attractions very loud, some are worse than others. Dinosaur and LMA come to mind. And fireworks. You might want to have her turn off the aid for these. And for sure have her remove it and put it somewhere waterproof for rides like KRR or Splash Mountain where it might get wet.

 

[Cedarmom]

For my unilateral loss kid, he only wore his aid during sit down lunches/dinners when we were trying to converse. Everything else is so loud he's overwhelmed and overstimulated as it is. He wore headphones in line at times to counteract the overwhelming background noise there. Lines in enclosed spaces are a huge issue for him--he can hardly function. His aid wouldn't have helped that. We also skip anything super loud--fireworks shows are a no go for us. We took his cues. When he told us he was all done, we left.
We didn't do any shows with him except Lights! Motor! Action!, and there we sat in the very back and the cars noises were still too loud for him. I wasn't even worried about him hearing what the guy was saying, but he probably didn't catch much of that.

 

[LynJ]

Thanks so much for all of your input. Kiddo has always been sensitive to loud noises, but we never connected that to a hearing problem. So this is a new adventure for us. Good point about turning down/off hearing aids in some environments.

I suspect she hasn't heard the show announcers, but those are hard for anyone to understand. I really appreciate all of your experience.