JOE McDonagh had got so accustomed to life with impaired hearing, that he didn’t realise he was in fact lip reading.
“When Geraldine [wife] was talking to me, I’d have to tell her to look at me. I was lip-reading but I didn’t realise it, I was in denial,” he says.
It was Gearldine who helped Joe recognise how deficient his hearing actually was. “I said to him one day, you are definitely deaf. He said ‘I am not deaf’. I said you bloody well are, you can’t hear the indicator when you’re driving the car,” she noted.
She said she had immediately noticed that Joe spoke very quickly, a knock-on effect of his poor hearing but she hadn’t noticed many other problems, other than having to face him when she was talking. “I found that odd. I’d be saying something and the next thing he’d say was ‘will you look at me when you’re talking?’ Why would I have to be looking at him, I’d think.”
The couple live in Sixmilebridge and Joe said he hadn’t a normal level of hearing even before they met, although he took little notice of it. Joe, however, now has his hearing back and is enjoying a superior quality of life that he hadn’t realised he was missing.
After a representative of Hidden Hearing came to the house, it was pretty obvious the hearing loss was quite significant. “He had me inside in the room sitting on the couch and he told me to look out the window. He stood at the door and he said 10 words. He said to repeat them after him but I got six of them wrong. My hearing was that bad,” Joe noted.
Geraldine was very anxious for him to get a hearing aid to deal with it, he says. “We had money that was saved for a holiday. She said to me, we’re going nowhere.”
Taking care of his hearing has made a huge difference, according to Joe. “When I was out before with Geraldine I used have to ask her what people were saying and I’d be smiling at people but I wouldn’t know what they’d said. I know since I got the hearing aids they’ve given me new life. I go to classes on computers and things and I’d never have had the confidence to do that before because I couldn’t hear what people were saying from a distance.”
Pictures of Louise Morrissey and Joe Dolan adorn the walls of their home and having his hearing back makes a big difference to the country music fanatic. “Nashville is where I want to get to before I die. I’d love to go, even if I never have another holiday again. I love the music but before I would have been hearing different words than what was there.”
The cause of Joe’s hearing loss isn’t clear, although it is suspected it may have been the result of not wearing ear protection while using kango hammers at work or a genetic quirk. He has great praise for hearing aids  though and says the benefits are simply immense. “I’d recommend it to anyone. I think nobody who needs a hearing aid should be without one. God bless the man who invented them.”