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anonymous838683 Asked July 2019

Has anyone had a dementia patient lose hearing temporarily or have hearing levels change?

I have A 94-year-old father who wears hearing aids. He complains that he can’t hear with the hearing aids. I have taken him back to the audiologist a number of times who will pair the hearing aids and then my father says he can hear. Then after a day or two he will say the one hearing aid is not working. I make sure that he has fresh batteries in the hearing aid when I go into see him daily. He told the nurse the other day he couldn’t hear with the hearing aids and she said when she took them out of his ears they were whistling and so they did have power in them But he says they’re not working. Other times he says everything is too loud with the hearing aids. I’m just wondering if the dementia is messing with his hearing capabilities. I have tried to research this but only find articles about people that are hard of hearing and how it can possibly make them a candidate for dementia.

lealonnie1 Jul 2019
My mother refuses to wear hearing aids, which is typical of her stubborn refusal to help herself. So, she's mostly deaf and it's getting worse by the week, it seems to me. She's now hearing 'whooshing' noises nearly all the time, and road noises from outside she insists are inside her room. She's had the maintenance man into her room countless times to 'fix' the noisy air conditioner which is NOT noisy at all. Nothing makes sense with dementia, and everything changes continuously, I'm learning. I am trying to let most of the complaining roll off of my back, and only tune into what sounds serious at any given moment. Hearing issues do not constitute 'serious' in the world of the very elderly with dementia. And even the 'serious' issues can wind up disappearing in short order, leaving us scratching our heads & wondering WHAT the heck is going on! There are lots of issues we wonder about but can't find answers to about dementia, I know. Since it's such a constantly changing arena, I'm not surprised.
Best of luck!

anonymous912123 Jul 2019
Old age is messing with his hearing and although these aides have come a long way, they are not perfect. I have a lot of men in my family that all complain about the same things.

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freqflyer Jul 2019
ebgranny, what you wrote would be identical to what my 97 year old Mom was dealing with.

Same thing, the audiologist would get both hearing aids to work and Mom was able to hear a tiny bit, but 2 days later, the hearing aids didn't work. My poor Dad went through battery after battery, usually losing half of them because the batteries were so small, trying to get the battery into Mom's hearing aids.

Oh that whistling, any time my Mom would put her head into the refrigerator, it would let out a loud whistling noise, but Mom never heard it. On a positive note, we knew where Mom was in the house :P

Mom also wanted her ears cleaned, but she couldn't stand the hot water that was used, so the lukewarm water was useless.... [sigh].

Mom kept thinking there was a hearing aid that would actually work for her. Thus, we were going from one audiologist to another, spending thousands of dollars. Mom refused to believe that her hearing was no longer correctable.

My Mom didn't have dementia. Thus, this is just a part of aging that some elders are going through.

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