"Say that again?" comes out of my mouth before I've even decided to say it (third time in ten minutes). Martin Callaghan, who taught gym down the hall from my office for more years than either of us likes to admit, just grins like he didn't catch the question either. He won't say it out loud, but I'd bet real money his ears are worse than mine at this point. That's retirement most days now: two old colleagues half-guessing at each other's sentences over coffee, and me finally treating my hearing health as something worth paying attention to instead of laughing it off.
Quick disclosure before we get into it: a few of the links below are affiliate links, and if you click through and buy something, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only mention supplements I've actually put on my own tracking log alongside my hearing aids — Audifort being the one I keep coming back to. I'm not a doctor, not an audiologist, nothing like that. Just a retired principal who got tired of guessing at conversations and started keeping better notes on what helps and what doesn't.
Why Does Everyone Ask If the Job Ruined My Hearing?
People assume thirty years in school hallways and cafeterias did this to me, and for a long time I assumed the same thing. The truth is messier than that. Some of it's the noise, some of it is just the ordinary age-related hearing loss that catches up with almost everyone eventually, whether their career was loud or quiet. A school cafeteria at lunchtime gets loud enough that you could measure it in real decibels, and it wore on the hair cells doing the actual work in there without me noticing at the time.
Sorting out which part came from the job and which part was just time passing isn't something I spend much energy on anymore. Here is the thing: it doesn't change what I do about it now, and chasing down the exact cause never once made a conversation easier to follow.
The TV Remote Wasn't the Actual Problem
My first move, long before any log or any supplement, was turning up the television. A little more every year, until my wife finally got fed up and hid the remote so I couldn't creep the volume any higher without asking. It didn't fix anything. The television got louder, sure, but conversations across the dinner table didn't get any easier to follow, and I was still asking people at church or the grocery store to repeat themselves.
Louder isn't the same as clearer. That's the part I wish someone had told me at forty instead of fifty-six. Turning up the volume on one object in the house was never going to fix what was actually happening to my hearing everywhere else.
Does the "Nod and Smile" Trick Actually Work?
For small talk, sure, right up until it isn't small talk anymore. You catch a rhythm, you see a smile, you nod along, and it holds up fine for a minute or two. It falls apart the moment you're somewhere with real background noise: a crowded restaurant, or a big room where sound bounces instead of landing. I noticed it badly one afternoon in the reading room at Milton Public Library, where every rustle and whisper seemed to arrive from three directions at once and I lost the thread of what the person next to me was saying, twice in the same sentence.
Nodding doesn't help in a room like that. It buys you a few seconds before someone realizes you're faking it, and that gap between what people think you understood and what you actually caught is where the isolation creeps in. Staying ahead of it is less like following a repair manual step by step and more like keeping up with grandkids. The pace keeps changing and you just have to stay in it.
Why I Started Tracking What Actually Helps
Getting hearing aids fixed the volume problem, mostly, but not the clarity. Words still came through a little smeared, like a radio station that's almost tuned in. That's when I started an actual log instead of just complaining about it out loud: restaurants, phone calls (which for some reason left me more worn out than almost anything else some days), family dinners, each one rated as easier or harder than the last time I'd checked in.
Alongside the log, I looked into hearing supplements, mostly out of curiosity about whether anything could support what the aids were already doing rather than replace them. Audifort is the one I keep using — I take it alongside my hearing aids, not instead of them — and I wrote up the longer version of that in My Log Notes After Three Months With Audifort if you want the fuller notes.
What About the Ringing Everyone Warns You About?
That's one of the most common questions I get once people find out I keep notes on this stuff: whether the ringing in my ears is something separate I should be worried about. Mine has stayed minor enough that I don't dwell on it, though I know people who track tinnitus and ringing as its own issue entirely, separate from everything else going on with their hearing.
What I think about more is presbycusis, which is just the general term for hearing loss that shows up with age — no mystery diagnosis required, no dramatic story behind it. Knowing the term didn't change much for me practically. It did stop me from treating every bad hearing day like some kind of emergency.
Comparing Notes With Neighbors and Old Colleagues
Glenda Farrow lives across the street, and she's been wearing hearing aids about as long as I have. She's also the only person I know who shows up to every appointment with an actual written list of questions, which honestly puts my scattered approach to shame. We compare notes over the fence sometimes about which supplements seem worth it and which don't.
She leans more skeptical on the supplement side than I do. My own take is that hearing aids and supplements are solving different pieces of the same problem, so I'd rather use both than pick a camp. I tried Quietum Plus for a stretch when my ears felt unusually full, and it's become part of the rotation alongside Audifort rather than a replacement for it — the full breakdown is in Hearing My Granddaughter Again: My Notes on Testing Four Supplements This Year.
What I'd Tell Someone Just Starting to Notice This
These days a Sunday dinner conversation happens without me needing to watch anyone's lips to keep up, and that's the difference that actually matters to me — more than any single product on a shelf. I still keep the log the low-tech way, on a yellow legal pad on the desk in my study, the same desk I hauled out of the building myself back when they renovated the front office. It's wedged now between two shelves of yearbooks and whatever colored pens happen to be within reach, under a window that looks out over the backyard — I crack it open when the weather allows.
If you're just starting to notice you're asking people to repeat themselves, don't wait for your own version of a missed sentence at the table to make it feel real. I wrote about that at more length in Beyond the Nod. Start wherever you are, log what changes, and if something like Audifort ends up being part of that for you, fine — but the noticing matters more than any one bottle.