My poor MIL is overwhelmed in a group setting, meaning more than two people with her at a time. A couple of years ago, when she turned 95, we gathered all of her children for a week long celebration. There were 8 of us with her, her 5 children and some of the spouses. It was fun (most of the time), but when we were all together she was just dazed. I don’t think she understood a word of what was said.
It may be too late to help her, but you never know. She’s a stubborn lady and has a goal of making it to her 100th birthday, which will be in 3 years. She’ll turn 97 next week. Still at home, but with caregivers that come during the day.
One of my complaints with these new computerized hearing aids is they have a overload protection circuit.
When either hearing aid receives an overly strong input, lets say loud car horn or a child screaming, they will suddenly go mute for a few seconds until the sound level diminishes, and only on the side that the sound comes from. While this may sound like a good thing for them to do to protect what’s left of your hearing, it does get annoying at times. Especially when just one side goes then your spatial awareness goes all to one side or the other like stereo headphones balance being turned full left or right.
And most annoying of all is when they do this and you can’t even hear what it was that made them do it in the first place.
They are overly sensitive to high pitched sounds that I and most people my age cannot hear anyway. Like say a dog whistle which we can’t hear but dogs do, the same thing happens with the hearing aids. It has full spectrum frequency response that is way beyond what my ears can or could ever hear. If it picks up a loud ‘sound’ in these frequencies it will react exactly the same way as if it was in the lower ranges and suddenly cut off for a few seconds until it goes away. And you get disoriented for those few seconds.................