Lizzie McCue went to her first Super Bowl party in years and didn’t complain about the noise. In fact, she was overjoyed to be able to hear conversations on the other side of the room.

The February bash was McCue’s first big social outing with new hearing aids.

"Instead of sitting in the corner with one or two people willing to repeat everything to me,’" she was part of the party.

"I felt like I was back to normal.’"

McCue, a saleswoman who lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., had been losing her hearing for years. In trying to compensate, she had amplifiers for the TV and the phone. She tried but failed at lip reading. Her kids would order for her at restaurants because she couldn’t understand the waiter.

But with her new digital hearing aid that hooks behind her ear and is mostly hidden by her hair, she’s regained more than she even realized she’d lost.

"You get so isolated when you can’t hear," McCue said. "You lose the flow of the conversation. Finally 10 minutes later you get a joke."
McCue, 56, attributes some of her hearing loss to being a baby boomer, a member of the generation that grew up with pounding rock ’n’ roll and further blasted their ears with headphones, hair dryers, lawn mowers and leaf blowers.

"Yes, I was one who sat as close as I could to those giant speakers at concerts," said McCue, who likely also inherited some of her impairment, seeing as five of seven children in her family started losing their hearing at middle age.

Dr. Robert Sweetow, director of audiology at the University of California, San Francisco, said he, too, grew up with loud music: "When I was a kid I set the radio as loud as it could go until it started to distort."

By Susan Swartz