Four weeks. That's roughly how long I'd been adjusting both my hearing aid settings and a new natural supplement routine before a waiter at a diner near the house recited the day's specials and I caught every single word without leaning toward him once. That's the kind of detail that ends up in the little hearing log I started keeping after retiring from thirty years running school hallways and cafeterias — and it's also what finally made sense of the audiogram that had been sitting in a drawer since spring.
Quick disclosure before we go further: this post includes a few affiliate links, including ones for hearing supplements I've tried myself, and if you click through and buy something, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you. I'm not a doctor or an audiologist, just a retired principal keeping his own log, so talk to a real professional before you change anything about your own hearing care.
Thirty Years of Noise I Never Measured
Thirty years in school hallways and gymnasiums does something to your ears that nobody really warns you about going in. The gym alone, with bleachers and a horn and three hundred kids waiting for a game to start, could probably rattle a decibel meter if anyone had bothered to bring one in — not that I thought about it then. Martin Callaghan taught gym at that same school for years, and we still have lunch every few weeks now that we're both retired. He jokes that half our conversations back then were just him mouthing 'WHAT' at me across the cafeteria, and somehow that still gets a laugh out of both of us.
That's probably where the 'Nod and Smile' phase started — faking a laugh at Martin's punchline was easier than asking him to repeat it a third time. I wrote more about that particular flavor of denial in The Silence at the Head of the Table: My Journey Back from the 'Nod and Smile' Phase, and looking at my old self in that piece still makes me wince a little.
What My Audiogram Showed Me
My wife finally pushed me into a hearing screening that spring, and sitting in that tiny soundproof booth felt like being sealed inside a submarine with a window. A technician played a string of beeps, from low hums up to high little chimes, and you press a button each time you catch one. Somewhere around the high end, I realized I was waiting for sounds that simply weren't arriving anymore.
When the audiologist walked me through the results, the shape of the line said more than any number could. It sat pretty level on the low end, then dropped hard once we got into the higher pitches — the same pitches, it turns out, that carry a lot of consonant sound. She pointed to a shaded band across the middle of the chart, something she called the 'speech banana,' and said that's roughly where ordinary talking lives. Once your line dips below that band, certain consonants start sliding past you — an s turns into a th before you notice, a cat sounds like a cap.
None of that makes you deaf. It makes you a translator working with half the alphabet, which is its own kind of exhausting — the reason I used to come home flattened some days without having done anything physically demanding at all.
The TV Remote We Eventually Hid
Here's the part I don't love admitting. Before any of this got sorted out properly, my fix for not catching dialogue was just turning the television louder, night after night, until my wife finally hid the remote so I'd stop cranking it past a level the rest of the house could tolerate. It didn't solve a thing — I just missed slightly less of the show and a lot more of her patience.
Choosing Audifort After Ruling Out the Easy Fixes
Hiding the remote was the push I needed to start taking a weekly log seriously instead of just complaining out loud. I wrote about how that log actually works in My Weekly Log: How I Finally Started Tracking Conversations Instead of Just Nodding Along, and three years into keeping it, the entries are honestly more useful to me than most of what came out of the audiologist's office.
Supplements entered the picture once I accepted that my hearing aids were handling volume but not necessarily the health of whatever ear tissue I had left. Audifort came up first, mostly because the ingredient list leaned on antioxidants rather than anything exotic, and it became the one I stuck with. I still have what audiologists call Presbycusis — the formal label for hearing that simply fades with age — so I wasn't expecting a miracle, just less fog by the end of a long day.
A few of my retired colleagues lean on Quietum Plus instead, mostly for the ringing they deal with more than I do, and I don't doubt it works for what they need. For my particular mix of workshop noise and restaurant chatter, Audifort has stayed my pick, though I'll say plainly that either approach is worth pairing with hearing aids rather than swapping one for the other.
Most of this log-keeping happens at a desk in my home study, across from a window that stays cracked open whenever the weather allows it. On quiet mornings I still catch the first bird outside before I've fully sat down, and I use that sound the way some people use a bathroom scale — if I can place which bird it is before my brain fully wakes up, that's a decent sign the day is starting on the better side of my hearing.
Testing It Where Noise Actually Lives
Real tests don't happen in quiet rooms, so I stopped trusting how I felt in my living room and started paying attention to harder spaces instead. The woodworking workshop I run for other retirees most weekends is one of them — a dust collector running, three guys asking questions over each other, and the old 'auto' setting on my aids just giving up entirely. The Braintree YMCA pool deck is another, oddly enough, since tile and water bounce sound around in a way that scrambles words before they reach you.
Glenda Farrow, who lives across the street and started wearing hearing aids about six months after I did, says the pool deck is her least favorite test too. We ended up comparing notes over the fence one afternoon about which restaurants in town have the worst acoustics, and hearing her say out loud how frustrating the adjustment period was took some of the sting out of mine. There's something to that — swapping notes with someone going through the same recalibration beats white-knuckling it alone, even if neither of us has fully solved the noisy-restaurant problem.
By three months into the Audifort routine, the pattern in my log was clear enough that I wrote a longer update, which you can read in My Log Notes After Three Months With Audifort if you want the fuller breakdown. Short version: the workshop afternoons got easier to follow, and the pool deck is still hard, but less hard than it was.
My Advice for Retired Principals Starting This Journey
If a fellow retired principal asked me where to start, I wouldn't lead with the graph or the supplement. I'd tell them to pick their hardest listening environment — their own version of a workshop or a pool deck — and use that as the real benchmark instead of how things sound in a quiet kitchen. The quiet room will always lie to you a little.
Understanding my own audiogram didn't repair anything, but it did take the shame out of the situation — this wasn't me getting old and useless, it was specific damage from a specific career, with specific tools available to manage it. Between the hearing aids, a calmer read on what that graph was actually telling me, and Audifort in my morning lineup, I've got my seat back at most tables that matter to me.
If you're curious about the natural-support side of this, it's worth checking the current details straight from Audifort's own site before you decide anything — pricing on these things shifts, and I'd rather send you to the source than guess. Pair whatever you choose with your hearing aids rather than instead of them, and don't wait as long as I did to go get the actual test.
None of this brings back every word I missed over the years. But it's made the words still coming my way a lot easier to catch — and that's worth more to me now than it would have been at twenty-five.