Transcript

Welcome back to the All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host Dr. Lilach Saperstein and this is the All About YOU mini episode. In the last full episode, episode 7 we discussed what happens at an audiology appointment and what you can expect for your hearing test.

George from St. Paul, Minnesota commented,

“Very informative. I wish I had known this before my appointment.”

and Raj from Queens, New York wrote to me saying,

“When I took my mom for her appointment, I was totally lost. It was a long and harrowing experience for both of us. She has dementia and has good days and bad days. I think your advice about making a morning appointment would have been a good idea for her. I’ll keep that in mind for future appointments.”

Grace commented,

“It totally calmed me down. Your podcast walked me through step by step what will happen. Listening to your podcast not only made me realize that the results of the test are partially affected by my anxiety and the time of day, I now know that I have the power to help myself succeed in making the results more accurate when I get my hearing tested.”

Thank you so much George, Raj and Grace for listening to the podcast and for sending me your responses.

Molly from Florida asked,

I have claustrophobia and I’m really scared to go because I don’t want to be in that small dark room. What do you suggest I do? I’m putting off the appointment because of this fear.

Great question Molly. There’s a few things I can say here.

1. Some booths are bigger than others. Look up online and see if there’s a few locations near you and give them a call to ask them about their set up. Some hospitals have bigger booths relatively than private practices, and also pediatric offices usually have more room in their booths to accommodate the children and their caregivers.

2. Meditation and grounding are amazing tools that I’ve personally used to deal with anxiety and high stress situations. It can be very helpful to focus on your breath, to remind yourself that you’re safe, to have some sort of anchor thought to carry you through the appointment. Of course, I don’t mean to minimize at all the debilitating sense of being claustrophobic but sometimes working on re-framing the experience can really help. Being in the room and the quiet and the solitude can actually be very soothing for some people. If you’re interested in this, I can share meditations with you, or even create a guided recording for you- I’ve done that before and it’s a tool that can be very powerful in a lot of different situations. Feel free to email me about this Molly, or anyone else who might be interested in this.

3. Advocate for yourself- tell the audiologist how you’re feeling and many times you can be accommodated. The door of the booth can be left open, and it will affect the low frequency results, where in some cases that’s not so crucial, especially if the office is not so busy or depending on the layout where the booth is and depends what kind of noise is around. You can absolutely ask for the lights to be turned on if they are dimmed. This is an excellent opportunity for you to become more assertive and advocate for yourself which is not easy but is really important.

Now,