Category Archives: Health

Using Honolulu 311, and my hearing aid adventure

7 Replies

Just a couple of routine items.

First, a “thank you” to the city’s refuse folks. Two weeks ago, I submitted a photo of some junk that had been sitting along the roadway just down the street from our house. There was a stuffed chair, and what looked like perhaps part of an old bed, and they had been sitting there for well over a month, and perhaps as long as a couple of months.

We had been seeing them in the mornings, and thought they had been put out for a scheduled bulky item pickup, but that never happened. So finally I got around to submitting a request through the Honolulu 311 system. That was two weeks ago. Then last Friday, I received a telephone call asking whether the junk was still there, and assuring me that someone would be out to assess it. I had to explain that the pile was growing, including what appeared to be a pickup truck’s load of yard waste. Then, just yesterday, lo and behold, the chair and other furniture were gone, but the yard waste was still there. But when we walked past the spot before dawn this morning, even the yard waste had been cleaned up.

I’ve previously reported graffiti at the beach park, and other issues, and have found the 311 system to always get a meaningful response from the city.

Now, just a brief word about the new pair of hearing aids purchased at Costco and picked up yesterday.

It seems that I overestimated how long I’ve been depending on hearing aids. I thought it had to be at least 15 years, maybe more, but after digging into whatever info I could find, it looks like I bought my first pair in 2008, and this is my third pair, the second via Costco.

For a long time, I hadn’t realized that the problem was my own hearing rather than the world being full of people who mumbled. The last straw was realizing that I couldn’t hear the judge in a court hearing even while I sat in the front row, about as close as I could get without being a defendant. I was going to interrupt and ask the judge to speak up, but luckily noticed that other in the audience weren’t having the same problem.

So off I went for a check on my hearing, first to a fancy ear, nose, and throat doctor, notable for doing an exam and then trying to sell me on an outrageously priced pair of hearing aids. I grabbed my hearing test results and got out of there fast before I was trapped or tricked into that unnecessary investment. Next stop, Ohana Hearing Care, a small shop on South Beretania where my mom had been going for years. Small place, personal attention, good service, less expensive than the premium spread.

But by the time I went looking for my next paid about five years later, I had read about the wonders of Costco’s hearing centers. An excellent guarantee, including a period of coverage if you lose one of your devices. All at a much lower costs, with service available through any Costco that has a hearing center.

That first pair of hearing aids from Costco were purchased in October 2013. And they were still working pretty well, except that they lacked the ability to work directly with my iPhone, and I figured that hearing technology had probably advanced quite a bit in those eight long years.

Anyway, I sat through another hearing test two weeks ago, and was steered to the two products that make up most of their sales, Costco’s own Kirkland model, a very reasonably priced set by a major manufacturer with most bells and whistles included, and the Jabra Enhance Pro PM, which cost several hundred dollars more.

I spent some time trying to figure out meaningful differences between them. Both have small receivers that sit up behind your ear, with a small wire and speaker that fits into your ear. Very similar in size and appearance. The Jabra offers a choice of rechargeable batteries or regular batteries, while the Kirkland was available as rechargeable only.

The Jabra brags of lasting up to 30 hours on a charge, which claimed to be “best in class.” That appealed to me. Then I saw that the Jabra is on Apple’s list of “Certified for iPhone” models that, they say, should work well if you live within the Apple environment. And that’s certainly where I reside, with my Mac laptop, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. In the end, that swayed my choice, and I went with the Jabra.

There was a two-week wait for delivery from the mainland, and my appointment to have it set up was on Tuesday.

That involved close to an hour of “calibration,” setting the hearing aids to compensate for the specific problems in my own hearing, frequency by frequency. A lot of fine tuning, it seems, then getting linked properly to my iPhone, doing a training lap after downloading the iPhone app, and then I was on my way with a new level of hearing.

I did experience a very noticeable improvement. If my ears were eyes, they world was starting to look just a bit blurry, like letters on a vision chart that were legible but didn’t qualify as “sharp.”

Now the world I’m hearing is again quite “sharp,” and I’m hearing more of conversations, and while watching television, than I have been hearing recently. So far–although it’s been not much over 24 hours–I’m quite impressed. Now I still have to fiddle with the app’s “programs,” settings designed for common situations, being in a restaurant, concentrating on hearing one person you’re in conversation with or, alternatively, trying to function in a group. There’s another program for listening to music or watching television. Another that offers an “ultra focus” on someone in front of you in a noisy environment. There are probably more that I just haven’t fiddled with yet.

Costco delivers this with a three-year warranty, including two years of replacement if lost. Free cleaning recommended every few months, which can be done while we’re shopping at Costco.

I’m still getting used to how the world sounds, and I would image my aging brain will take a week or so to become accustomed to it all. Right now, count me as a very happy camper.

That’s my experience. Your mileage may vary.

Ige surprises with a call for residents to stay home and visitors to stay away

24 Replies

Hawaii Governor David Ige made a couple of unusually direct appeals to travelers yesterday.

“Tourists should stay away from Hawaii, and residents should restrict travel to essential business only at least through the end of October,” Gov. David Ige said Monday, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

“I’m asking all residents and visitors alike to restrict travel, curtail travel, to Hawaii to essential activities only,” Ige said.

His comments reflect both concern with the new and dramatically higher levels of new Covid-19 cases, and rising hospitalization numbers which have left some medical facilties filled to capacity. There’s also a concern that while hotels are enjoying relatively high occupancy, visitors are finding restaurants operating at reduced seating capacity, creating long lines and extended waits, while other event venues are again facing strict limits on both indoor and outdoor events and gatherings.

We’ve been hoping to take a long-planned trip to visit friends and family near San Francisco in mid-September, and carefully watching how the current covid spike is playing out in places where we are hoping to spend time. Ige’s call to avoid non-essential recreational travel now puts us on the spot, along with many others, I’m sure.

What’s the proper response? If we ignore the governor’s call, are we aligning ourselves with irresponsible anti-maskers and dangerous anti-vaxxers, and suddenly becoming part of the problem ourselves?

It poses one of those ethical questions. While it may not matter whether we choose to make a less-than-essential trip to the mainland, if everyone makes the same choice, it would probably undercut attempts to get this surge in cases under control.

So how should we be processing the governor’s call to avoid travel?

[Update 8/25/2021: Today I’m cancelling the various parts of our previously planned September trip to California. After considering the different moving parts of the Covid-19 situation, including growing evidence fully vaccinated people can be asymptomatic carriers of the Delta variant–meaning they may not know they are infected but can spread it to others–we decided to heed Governor Ige’s call to defer nonessential travel at this time. Luckily, it’s a disappointment, but not a huge sacrifice for us. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.]

I don’t recall seeing this reported here

3 Replies

The case of a visitor from the Czech Republic who caught Covid-19 while visiting Hawaii is making news elsewhere, but has apparently remained under the radar here.

I saw the case referenced in a New York Times column on Monday (“ Don’t Want a Vaccine? Be Prepared to Pay More for Insurance”).

Getting hospitalized with Covid-19 in the United States typically generates huge bills. Those submitted by Covid patients to the NPR-Kaiser Health News “Bill of the Month” project include a $17,000 bill for a brief hospital stay in Marietta, GA (reduced to about $4,000 for an uninsured patient under a “charity care” policy); a $104,000 bill for a fourteen-day hospitalization in Miami for an uninsured man; possibly hundreds of thousands for a two-week hospital stay — some of it on a ventilator — for a foreign tourist in Hawaii whose travel health insurance contained a “pandemic exclusion.”

When I looked further, I quickly found the original report by Kaiser Health News, which reported on the case in May (“Tourists, Beware: Foreign Visitors’ Travel Health Insurance Might Exclude Pandemics
”).

Vlastimil Gajdoš, a visitor from the Czech Republic, appealed to his own government after his travel insurance company gave notice they might not cover his bill for two weeks in Queens Hospital due to a “pandemic exclusion” in the policy’s fine print.

Gajdoš…reached out to the embassy and his employer for help after his travel insurer denied him coverage. The employer pledged to help him if his plan did not cover his hospital stay, he said, but the government intervention worked. The insurer ultimately agreed to cover Gajdoš’ expenses.

The couple would not disclose the final tally for Gajdoš’ hospital stay, but a typical 10-day course of treatment in an intensive care unit can run into several hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He was discharged from the Queen’s Medical Center on April 8, grateful for the care. Gajdoš said his insurer’s actions caught him off guard. He intentionally purchased a more expensive policy with the expectation that they would receive help, not pushback, from the plan.

I suppose that’s news which might not be well received by the visitor industry as it has been promoting Hawaii as a relatively safe tourist destination.

Remember when more than 100 daily cases meant a Tier 1 lockdown?

21 Replies

Longtime activist and thinker Bart Dame took to Facebook last week to look back at the “official” chart setting out the system of tiers for reopening from last year’s pandemic lockdown.

Remember this?

A 7-day average case count greater than 100 would put us back to Tier 1, pretty much locked down again. Oahu is now over 120 cases per day.

Bart then questioned how we are going to handle the situation if this surge caused by the Delta variant continues? At what point do we step back a bit? Here’s an excerpt from his FB post.

…what happens IF the infection and positivity rates continue to climb? Can we agree in advance upon objective metrics so we will know if/when we need to re-impose restrictions? Or has COVID fatigue swept away the ability to discuss this rationally?

Earlier this week, Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi said quite definitively, and this is a direct quote: “Going back to Tier 4 is not an option.” He didn’t say, “I think we need to do what we can to suppress the spread of the virus because going back to Tier 4 would be undesirable.” No, he said it won’t happen. Irregardless, so to speak.

…But if the whole idea of setting up the Tier system was to establish objective targets and to remove the decision from the influence of a politician’s desire for popularity, we need to talk about what we need to do if the current March towards re-opening causes the rate of infections to climb. To rule out that discussion in advance is not the sign of a bold leader, but of a fool.

Thoughts?