Nathalie Herron

Nathalie Herron, 39, was born with a high-frequency hearing loss bilaterally. She wore Behind-The-Ear (BTE) hearing instruments when she was young, but stopped wearing them around the age of 13. She became frustrated with her hearing aids that made everything either too soft or amplified everything. She would get headaches, which was attributed to her sensitivity to loud noises. She gave up on hearing aids altogether believing that her type of hearing loss could not be helped by wearing hearing aids.

Nathalie Herron, binaural Element 4 Moxi wearer with standard xReceiver and open sleeve mold.

Without hearing aids, the simplest tasks became frustrating ones. As a French teacher, she had difficulty discriminating among consonant sounds and telling whether students repeated words correctly or not.

Listening to confirmation numbers on the telephone, when ordering items or doing banking, posed additional challenges. She also knew that she was misunderstanding conversations. She would miss hearing words spoken by her four year old daughter, and she could not hear her husband when he spoke to her from a distance or from another room.

Then Nathalie tried Element™ 4 Moxi hearing instruments. Nathalie adapted to her Element 4 Moxi hearing aids very quickly. Instead of amplifying both high and low tones, she was immediately impressed that the low tones sounded the same as she was used to hearing, while the high tones sounded much clearer.

Nathalie also noticed how much easier it was to listen while in a car. She could understand the lyrics to songs and decrease the volume on her car radio:

Nathalie’s audiogram illustrating her normal to severe ski-sloping sensorineural hearing loss bilaterally.

Nathalie is also grateful that she can hear her daughter more easily. Since her daughter has a slight speech delay, hearing is critical to helping her improve her language skills. Nathalie is beginning to notice that her daughter is articulating her words more clearly and not yelling at her. Before, when her daughter became frustrated that Nathalie was not hearing her, she would resort to yelling. Now this happens much less frequently.

In addition, while recently attending her daughter’s swimming lesson, Nathalie discovered that she was able to hear the swimming teacher’s instructions to the class, something she was never able to do before wearing her hearing aids. Nathalie was particularly surprised by how clear the sound was, considering the pool area is typically very busy and full of echoes and sound reverberations.

Nathalie liked her Element Moxi’s onBoard™ control. She found it convenient to switch between programs. Nathalie also no longer avoids using the telephone. She switches to her easy-t program so she can hear conversations clearly and easily.

“These [Element 4 Moxi] hearing aids are not at all like the ones when I was a kid,” Nathalie explains.

“Both my brother and mother have hearing losses. I am going to recommend these hearing aids to them because they have helped me immensely. The overall clarity is excellent, and I rarely have to adjust the volume. Most of the time, I forget that I am wearing them.”