Restaurant Night

ey everybody,

Just wanted to drop in and share a new experience!

So I was out to dinner with my girlfriend last night, and we went to a pretty packed Burger place. (Luckily, they have awesome veggieburgers, so I can have my vegan fix hahaha--but grossly enough, they put friggin bacon, which was NOT on the menu for that burger, on my burger, which I had to yoink right off after a bite, to find it hidden under the bun?!)... Sorry for the digression... onward...!

W(ell, except for the couple hours Amanda asked to wear them to her class in the afternoon, haha, so she could 'see how I heard',---and she found that if she tugged the earmolds out a tiny bit, to reduce the 'suction', then things were balanced, albeit even on '1', they were loud for her--to me, I have to put them between 2-3, and squish them in a bit She described some things to me while she had them in, that I kinda heard with them in a different way, and I told
her that what she was hearing on '1', was maybe something similar to the sounds I hear with them up louder---I had been wearing my HA's just about all day, and didn't want to take them out as I often did in the beginning. I decided to be brave and wear them into the restaurant. Of course, I was bombarded with tons of crowd noise and such. I normally sit across from Amanda, but I chose to sit right next to her instead, so I could not only snuggle a tad, haha, but also hear her better. (Surprisingly, she was on my left, "worse" side, but I could still hear her and understand her almost as easily as if she had been on my right!) I persevered through the racket and worked on tuning out the extraneous noise, although she had to repeat the waiter's questions to me a few times because I could hear him. A couple screeching kids made me cringe at times, and there was that awful "oven beeper" noise, I think it was, that kept going off, and I kept wondering if my "ears" were whistling, but I decided they weren't, it was just the noise. I'm sure you are all familiar with that "ambiance" that assaults our microphones, plunging into our eardrums, hahaha. As noisy as it was, I felt like I was making headway forward in trying out my HA's and learning to listen again, and overall, it was OK. :)

On the ride home, we had the windows open, and the radio up, but the wind caused the music to be quite intermittent, at least to me, and I was surprised to find that I had turned my HA's all the way up to try and hear the music, even with all the wind (sometimes I think I'm a volume junkie hahaha)!!! It was a sea of wind noise, and then I'd hear Amanda's voice quite loudly in my ear when she'd talk to me. I wouldn't realise how loud everything was until we'd slow down to pay a toll, or roll the windows up, that everything was quite lud, and I had to roll down the volume nubs hahaha!

And, as we entered my town, I popped my HA's out, them squealing in protest as I tugged out the molds, to give my ears a rest for the day, and really noticed just how much quieter my world really has been for a long time... An odd introspection, to be sure...

But it was nice to get out to dinner, as we hadn't in awhile, and I felt better about 'being brave' and working through the racket... :) I'm finding that even if some places are difficult, I still am happy to find myself hearing better, even if in the slightest, you know? As tiring as trying to tune out noise can be, it's less tiring than straining to hear in the first place! XD

Does anyone have any tips that have worked for them, in dealing with listening through HA noise, and in noisy places?? Would wait-staff be perplexed if I didn't even talk, just wrote everything down (but then that leads my troubled eyes to have to stick the pad to my nose to see!)??

Peace everybody!
~Justin