For those of you that are (or are planning to be) bimodal...

Or binaural, or whatever you want to call it. Simply put, wearing both a hearing aid and a CI.

Even though I'm bilateral now, I thought I'd get the word out in case anyone else had the same problem I once had.

When I still wore a hearing aid in my left ear, but had just gotten a CI in my right, I kept running into a problem. My hearing aid was constantly breaking. Sure, it broke before, but this was a constant. Two days or less after getting it repaired, it would break again! And it wasn't like it used to break, where it would just stop working altogether. It would start sounding like static. When someone spoke, all I heard was static. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I could hear and understand crystal-clear with my hearing aid, but I still had some speech recognition in quiet, and could identify voices. When it was broken, it was really quiet I could not understand anything whatsoever! It would bother me more than it helped.

After about the tenth time of it being sent back and repaired, my HA audiologist wanted me to come in to her office to see if there was "anything we could do."

Huh? It's broken!

So after talking for a while, she looked at me sympathetically and said, "You know, we could do a hearing test, just to be sure. It's only one ear, so it won't take that long."

Ohhh I see how it is! They think it's my hearing! No siree!

"No, I'm not doing a hearing test! It's broken! Listen to it if you don't believe me!"

So she did. She thought it sounded "a little funny", and I'm assuming that for me, being deaf, I just notice it a lot more. If you're listening to my HA turned all the way down so that it's tolerable, you're not going to notice that it's a lot quieter!

So we got it replaced, and once again it broke. It must've broken a minimum of twenty times, when finally my audiologist talked to her husband. He's not an audiologist, just some smart, scientific guy. He said that just like a magnet can ruin speakers, they can probably ruin a hearing aid. So if they're ever close together, the CI magnet is probably breaking the hearing aid.

Like when they're in the Dry and Store. Which I'm to lazy to use every night, so I only use it every other night. And then it's broken the next morning.

dingdingding! Finally, twenty hearing aids later, an answer! We invested in another Dry and Store, and from then on, until my second CI surgery, I stored them separately. And it would only break occasionally, if I accidentally held them in the same hand.

I should add that I used to wear a digital hearing , but was not the newest technology at the time (although it was when we bought it!) It was called an Oticon Adapto Power. It was a nice, compact, little hearing aid that used one tiny size 13 battery. Sorry, rambling on here... Just wishing that my CI processors were that small! Some day.. I have no idea if the same thing applies for other hearing aids, or if the magnets don't do anything to them.

So anyway, lesson learned. Don't store magnets near a hearing aid!