My necessary new hearing aids

Diego Alejandro Ortuño Rosales is organising this fundraising appeal on behalf of Robert McLendon.

Donation protected

Hello!

Let me tell you my story. I have been hard deaf my whole life, but most people haven't notice. My parents didn't know until I got a hearing examination when I was 5 years old and they got it like if someone would have bathe them with cold water without warning. By then, I had more than 80% of hearing loss. And this condition is degenerative, I have been losing my hearing condition more and more, now I got 94% of hearing loss.

Here is a picture of mine, 6 years old, where I'm wearing my hearing aid:

In my sister's baptism, same year, my father, me, my mother, my aunt and my uncle:

This is me and my dear father:

To compensate for this degenerative hearing loss, I had to buy many models of hearing aids throughout my life. Sometimes because new models would be better to prevent degenerative hearing loss and improve hearing quality, sometimes because hearing aids got damage or simply got old and there was no maintenance or spare parts to save them.

These are my actual hearing aids (Supero 413 AZ):

Here, I am wearing my actual hearing aids:

Recently, I met my audiologist because one of my hearing aids was malfunctioning, and she told me that my actual hearing aids were designed to have 6 years lifespan and that they were now in a very poor state of maintenance, without spare parts to fix them. Since I bought them around 2006, I made the math and realized that I have been using those 12 years! My audiologist looked inside my hearing aids and said that they looked like chewing gum, that I needed new aid hearings urgently. My hearing aids lasted this long because I took good care of them and because of their good quality.

My audiologist did the only thing left to do with my hearing aids: clean them. For now, they're working. But if my hearing aids show another problem, maybe there's no way back for them and I would have problems in my work, in my relations, in my life. Everything today depends on communication.

I told you that my parents didn't realize I was deaf until I was 5 years old. I learnt to speak by reading lips. I related with other kids by playing games. I was a child, who was blessed to have very loving parents that gave me enough attention so that I wouldn't need to make a truly visible extra effort to relate with them. But as I kept growing up (who doesn't?), I became more and more dependent on my communication skills and my hearing aids.

So, that's why now I'm asking for your help to buy my new hearings aids. I can't even imagine the changes that have come along in the last 12 years, only seeing computers and cell phones developing. I'm excited about this. But, unlike my older hearing aids, new ones are very expensive.