My 86 year old mother and I live in a two story garden home. This arrangement seems to work most of the time until she wants something and yells at me for a response and cannot hear me when I yell back unless I'm practically "in her face" and then asks me why I am yelling at her. It sounds laughable, but really is most annoying. Sometimes I just pretend I don't hear her.
When suggesting a hearing aid, she says that they don't work, too expensive, unsightly. So what, I ask is the solution?
I never heard my dad complain that his hearing aide was unsightly but I do know it was very expensive and I don't recall it being covered by insurance (although maybe it was). He also had problems with it regularly and I'd have to take him to Beltone and have them fix it. And once he had the hearing aide he was bothered by other noise as the hearing aide was very sensitive. When the battery was running low (which seemed to be all the time) the thing would squeal and whine to the point where I could hear it. And as he aged he couldn't change the battery himself which was fine when he lived with me as I was right there but not so good when he went into a NH as he had a difficult time finding a staff member who would change it for him. He also began to lose it, it went through the wash and we made the decision not to buy him another one as he would have lost that one too and, as I said, it was very expensive. We got used to yelling.