NPR Journalist Mary Louise Kelly: Hearing Aids are a "Revelation"

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What if your job depended on listening but you had trouble hearing?

That’s exactly the situation veteran journalist Mary Louise Kelly found herself in, as she slowly came to realize she had lost some ability to hear. Kelly is one of the hosts of NPR’s All Things Considered.

“It's, I guess, one of the biggest ironies from the department of you could not make this up that, yes, my job is to ask people questions and then listen - like, really, really listen to the answers - and I can't really hear,” Kelly told NPR’s TED Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi in an interview.

Kelly said she lived with hearing loss for some time before recognizing its effects.

“I don't know exactly when I started to have hearing loss,” she said. “It's a funny thing. I think it's a little more complicated than realizing you don't have the same eyesight you did when you were 16 and you need glasses. With hearing, it's more nuanced. You don't know if you're not hearing everything that somebody else is.”

It wasn’t until she was 42 and on tour for her just-published book when “it became apparent at event after event, I couldn’t hear the questions,” she said. “It felt like everybody was mumbling all the time.”

She scheduled a hearing test; an experience she described as “humbling.”

“I still, to this day, can pass with flying colors the little minimal hearing tests that we all get with an annual physical where they say, you know, raise your hand if you hear the beep,” she said. “I can hear the beep. What I can't do is distinguish between consonants. No matter how loud the volume is, I can't make out words anymore.”

It was then Kelly decided to start using hearing aids.

“I got hearing aids, and that was a revelation,” she said. “The first day I got them, everything was so loud in ways good and bad. Good ways - I'd kind of forgotten pop music had words, and I was bopping along, singing and thinking, I haven't actually heard what they were saying in I don't know how long, but it's been a while.”

Her biggest “moment of joy” came when she realized she could once again hear what her children were saying in the backseat of the car — she hadn’t been able to make out their conversations for years.

“It had just been this hum,” she said of her children’s chatter. “I hadn't been able to hear what they were saying, and now I could listen to them.”

Listen to the full interview here.