Flat losses with variability and feeling of fullness shouts mixed/conductive issues. Do you have a recent Bone Conduction (BC) result too?
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@Um_bongo may be right. Intermittent symptoms may also suggest Eustachian tube (auditory tube) dysfunction. It connects the throat with the middle ear to equalize air pressure on both sides of the eardrum…
I just looked at my audiogram. It appears when the new upgrade was done to this site - it messes up my audiogram. When I look at where you input the losses is fine but the audiogram is up and down like a heart machine.
Looking at a few other people’s I also so very large ups and downs. I wonder if there is an issue with the site???
Yes, if you left, for example, 750 and 1500 Hz blank, it will appear as 0 dB hearing loss. This is a bug to report to @AbramBaileyAuD.
Wonderful. A lot of my pediatric patients ask for their hearing aids right away. Being able to hear is good. “Mild” loss is a misnomer. With a flat 35 dB loss he might have had a speech intelligibility score (SII) of 56% and the hearing aids are bringing him back to 100%. Very good.
Your unaided hearing loss has an SII of 0%. Kind of your wife to face you and raise her voice when you are not wearing your hearing aids, that’s tiring too. Maybe there are some adjustments that you can have made to your hearing aids that would be more of a compromise? More comfortable, but not nothing. I have a patient who has a “bad day” program with significantly less gain that he flips into when he’s grumpy/tired. I think at this point it’s important that your son doesn’t see you not wearing your hearing aids or complain about them. It is important that he wear his and you are his role model.
Maybe it’s not about the hearing aids at all. Are you getting enough sleep generally? If you’re just straight up exhausted, then I would imagine taking your hearing aids out and ignoring the world would be pretty relaxing.
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I wonder why the “To my dismay” - In your heart of hearts, do you sense that retreating into semi-isolation is overall not an advantageous move? Personally, I’d definitely think it’d not be a good move, given all the advice one hears about the importance for mental health of maintaining good social contacts.
I would worry about getting too comfortable without them. My father waited a long time before he would acknowledge he needed hearing aids (like, 20 years), and by the time he got them, he never could adjust to them. He looked for any excuse not to wear them, and his communication with the world suffered as a result, and his social isolation increased. Also it took a toll on his marriage with my mom.
No question, it’s an extra cognitive load to try to hear and speak in many social environments, and it’s exhausting. Sometimes I can’t wait to get home and just yank 'em.
Silence is comfortable, certainly. I wait an hour or two in the morning before putting them in, enjoying the silence. But when it’s time to get out to meet the world, in they go.
How lucky you are to have such a sympathetic and loving spouse.
Really interesting topic you’ve raised here.
I personally tend to use my HA as much as possible and feel “vulnerable” when I don’t have them on.
Nonetheless, the point you’ve raised takes me back to the period before adopting them. I am 30 and started using them straight out of High School as a way to perform better ad University and in life. Although HAs have amplified the diversity of sounds I can catch and helped me with understanding better some kind of conversations when I think back I would say I was not doing that bad either without them.
Now after 10 years using them to be honest when I take them off it scares me to see that I cannot basically hear anything below a certain volume, let alone understand that. I don’t knw if that’s related somehow to the fact that my “hearing” is not anymore used to function properly without the HAs assistance or what…just really interesting (and sometimes depressing).
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I don’t see your audiogram. What sort of loss might you have???
New on this website - will try to upload an audiogram at some point (:
I have a “ski slope” hearing loss accentuated on high notes - severe level.
Has your hearing loss gotten worse in the last 10 years e.g. on tonal audiogram or WRS in quiet/OuickSIN score?
Did you have REM on your hearing aids 10 years ago?
I think it’s because your expectations were raised while you were at university. You probably didn’t realise there were social situations you couldn’t participate in without HA, and you didn’t check to see if you could. University is harder for hard of hearing people than high school.
AH!!! A fellow “flatliner” just like ME!!! Well, my audigram is WORSE than your’s, but I’m thrilled to meet a “relative”!
Okay, that said, if you have “fluctuating” periods of loss I’m confounded as to how that would happen. If you have an identical audiogram as me, I can tell you: ain’t no such thing in my world as periods where I actually hear better, sad to say!
Your wife is a DEAR to make the effort to help you hear her, but she is only one of many who may be needing/trying/wanting to communicate with you! So put the aids in, try to get used to the world as it sounds around you, or go back to your audiologist and tinker with things like Noise Management.
I seriously can not fathom me getting through a day (or hour, minute or second!) without both aids IN and turned ON. Wearing my aids even helps me “see” better cuz I’m able to hear clues to assess distance, footing and whatnot.
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My hearing has definitely gotten worse - but even thinking back 5 years ago I had the same feeling for instance.
We’ve done a mix of REM and personal feedback on where I was experiencing difficulties etc. Nowadays I tried pure REM but it’s basically identical to my personalized setting based on feedback so I don’t feel that to be the case.
I of course struggle more because I’ve grown up Speaking Romanian/Italian while the past 6/7 years I have been mostly speaking English for work/studies purposes so that ads a layer of difficulty.
As you mentioned probably the overall University environment was much tougher so that might also be partof it.
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I got hearing aids to help me better understand human speech. Ironically, in my experience, those who are non-verbal speak the clearest of all.
When you do this you will end up isolating yourself socially. Also, not using your hearing aids will slowly degrade the part of your brain that handle noise processing. This cannot be healed and you will slowly lose your ability to hear properly even with hearing aids.
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I don’t know what your audiogram is, but in my case, I have MUCH difficulty understanding English speech. My audiogram is stable since I was 4 years old.
Before 2015 (I was 26 then), I couldn’t even associate English speech with the closed captions that were displayed simultaneously.
Back in the day, I watched 1 episode (lasting ~ 1 hour) of the English version of “Game of Thrones” in 2-3 hours because of trying to train my comprehension.
Finally, it paid off a bit. Although I still can’t understand much English in ordinary conversation, I can now definitely associate English speech with closed captions even without using a hearing aid and sound processor, and even when I listen to the already fast-speaking Dr. Cliff at 1.5x speed on YouTube. 
Now I am trying to train my CI ear and watch for chestnut-colored Infinio Sphere 90s - maybe this helps more with English conversation in daily life.
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I don’t know about % of WRS in quiet (Word Recognition Score). This may explain a bit some about potential of your speech understanding.
I meant for that to be “poetic”. Although, I used to have my audiiogram posted. I’ll have to see if I can track that down and put it up again.
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Okay, I’m sorry, I didn’t get the metaphor 
remind me with Alison Krauss “when you say nothing at all” 
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