How can I tell if I'm losing my hearing?

One morning, you're sitting in a small office, having a very nice conversation with a co-worker. You're functioning fine. You have no problems hearing or understanding Dan tell you about his son's first soccer game and his mom's recent health problems.

That evening, you're in a busy restaurant with your entire family celebrating Grandma's 83rd birthday. Someone at the table tells a joke. Well, you assume it's a joke because everyone else is laughing, but truthfully you didn't hear everything that was said so you just laugh anyway.

So what's going on?

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This experience is typical of someone whose hearing is starting to decline. Hearing loss most often happens so slowly, so gradually, that we don't actually realize it is happening. And it's very hard to really know if you aren't hearing as well as you used to.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Are you asking friends and family to repeat themselves?
• Do you have difficulty understanding people on the telephone or on TV?
• Is it hard to follow conversations in noisy places like restaurants?
• Do you feel like people often mumble or just don't speak as clearly as they used to?
• Are loved ones getting frustrated because they feel you do not understand them?

Hearing loss is not "all-or-none." We often think that if someone has hearing loss, they have trouble hearing everything. Very commonly, people lose the hearing of higher-frequencies (pitches) first, while their low-frequency hearing might still be fine. This makes people feel like they can hear fine, but people are just mumbling.

The first step for anyone who even just thinks they might be experiencing some hearing loss is to have a hearing evaluation.  Having a full diagnostic test by an audiologist will help you determine why you are experiencing the problems you have been more aware of recently.  Your audiologist will then make recommendations to you - from annual hearing tests to monitor your loss, to a referral to a physician and maybe even hearing aids. But don't be afraid, we don't know what you need (if anything) until we know what is going on.