My mother has a hearing aid. She started to have hearing problems at quite a young age - probably when I was about the age that my children are now. I do worry that perhaps I might start to go the same way. At the moment I have really good hearing. My sight is not brilliant - I wear glasses but I often rely on my hearing to help me in difficult conditions such as when I am crossing roads in the rain and my glasses are too wet to see out of. I also like to be able to hear at night when I am in bed and not wearing my glasses so that I know if anyone is moving about in the house. I would feel really lost if I could not hear anything. I know that hearing aids can be quite good but my Mum still has trouble hearing in certain circumstances. If there is a lot of background noise she fins it hard to make out the conversation because her hearing aid increases the volume of all noise and she is not very good at filtering out the sounds that she wants to hear from distracting background noise, This is something that I am very good at, at the moment. I am also very good at closing my ears to the television and the sounds of the children playing when I am trying to concentrate on something else. I sometimes worry that I might start just closing my ears to everything and it could lead to me having hearing problems. My Mum reckons that she started to go deaf because she didn’t like hearing my sister and I arguing when we were little and I really hope that is not true and that I will not start to lose my sharp hearing.