PHOENIX — The gift of sound was given in Carefree on Tuesday morning.
When Rose Porcelli sat down at Beltone in Carefree, she told the specialist her mother Caroline Mayo couldn’t hear the radio on the way to the office. Porcelli says for years she’s had to talk louder when she wanted to communicate with her 85-year-old mother.
“You can’t hear the baby?” Porcelli asked Mayo. as a five-month-old baby bounced on her lap.
Not being able to listen to the song on the radio is one thing, but not hearing the coos from Tobias, her great-grandson is entirely different.
When it came to talking with others, Porcelli felt the younger generation was missing out on all wisdom their grandma had to offer.
“Very difficult for us to communicate and heartbreaking,” she said.
That all changed when she put on a pair of donated hearing aids.
With the flip of a switch on her new hearing aids, Mayo heard her great-grandson for the very first time.
”You’re noisy!” said Mayo smiling at the baby.
“You think so? He’s like that all the time,” said Porcelli.
“I know but now I can hear!,” said Mayo.
Rose says this is just the start for the family to now engage with the matriarch.
She can pass down “cooking, understanding, compassion, things she gave us growing up,” said Porcelli.
Dustin McMinn of Beltone says these hearing aids will help retrain the brain to hear like it once did but will take time.
If hearing loss goes untreated, he says it could lead to the loss of some vital cognitive functions.
“If we go a long period of time not hearing speech sounds, your brain forgets how to compute those speech sounds,” said McMinn.
The hearing aids are about the size of a piece of chewed gum. The retail price for these hearing aids is about $7,000 to $8,000.
They help, in part, by amplifying things like high-frequency noises, but it’s no cost to grandma Mayo, thanks to the Beltone foundation.
The possibilities of how Mayo’s new ears will change her life are endless and how it will impact others around her, is loud and clear.
“Now I can hear, if they’re talking about me,” said Mayo as she smiles from ear to ear.
