BYUI student gifted hearing aids thanks to Miracle-Ear Foundation
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IDAHO FALLS– The Miracle-Ear Foundation donated a pair of state-of-the-art hearing aids to a local BYU-Idaho student who only recently learned of her hearing issues.
Cali Ellis is a junior studying psychology, but she didn’t become fully aware of her hearing issues until recently.
“We’re thinking it is something I was born with, but I didn’t really start noticing it until sophomore year of high school,” explained Ellis. “(Whenever) I would wear one (earbud) in my left ear, I would have to turn it up way louder than I did when I had it in my right ear and my sister always jokes that it’s because I’m deaf and I always told her it wasn’t. She was right.”
Ellis says when she first started to notice it, she never considered that they might actually have hearing issues. She always blamed the cause on more mundane things like clogged ears.
Dr. Williams lives in Ellis’s neighborhood, and the two attend the same church. Ellis said that when her mom first brought up Williams, Ellis decided to go and get a free hearing consultation.
As it turned out, Ellis learned she had severe hearing loss in her left ear and moderate hearing loss in her right ear. As far as she and doctors know, she was either born with it, or the hearing loss may have developed as a result of multiple ear infections when Ellis was young.
Having hearing aids has already helped Ellis in everyday life.
“I was talking with my mom about this recently and she said that she had noticed that when I got hearing aids, I wouldn’t miss certain parts of the conversation. Apparently before I had been missing like two sentences,” said Ellis.
In academics, Ellis says she is sure she missed a lot and that she used to struggle in school.
“I like to consider myself an intelligent person, so it was frustrating when I couldn’t understand what the teacher was saying or what the instructions were and things like that. I’m sure (hearing difficulties) played a bigger role than I can even realize in my academic life,” said Ellis.
Ellis was first tested for hearing aids back in December, where she was given a temporary pair. But on Thursday, the Miracle-Ear Foundation was able to donate a pair of advanced hearing aids to Ellis, who had to pay next to nothing for them.
Ellis says the newer pair is much higher quality than the loaners, and they’re stacked with different settings and options to assist her hearing, such as an option to tune out background noise and conversations in a restaurant.