Patient Profile: Female, Professional, Active lifestyle, Style Maven and Hearing Impaired
The profile of Dorrie Jacobson gets better and should be inspiring to anyone, perhaps even more so to those with hearing loss.
Dorrie is 81 years old and a proud wearer of hearing aids provided by Robyn Edgson. She leads a life as active as many half her age! In fact, she may be one of the biggest proponents of the anti-aging movement today. She refuses to submit to popular culture’s version of what aging should look like. She isn’t slowing down for anyone.
When Dorrie tells her story, she sheepishly recalls, with a giggle, how she ignored the doctor’s orders to not fly with her head cold; the result of doing so was pretty serious hearing loss. She’s been wearing hearing aids ever since, for over 25 years. By the time we’re Dorries’ age, we too are likely to experience hearing loss… due to the aging process, itself. As we age, we’re prone to developing Presbycusis, otherwise known as age-related hearing loss (ARHL). It comes with time. By the time we reach 65-74 years old, 1/3 of us will have ARHL. ½ of us by the time we’re 75. But hearing loss doesn’t have to slow us down, as is evident by Dorrie’s life.
Throughout her life, Dorrie reinvented herself again and again. She worked in the modeling industry, owned a designer boutique, worked in real estate, marketing and make-up. Her claim to fame is the time she spent as a Playboy Bunny. See the trend? She’s into aesthetics. Last year, when she was looking for her next venture, she decided to launch a fashion and beauty tips website for people her age. But first she had to learn how to get social. Her daughter quickly taught her social media, and Dorrie was up and running.
What started as fashion and beauty tips on her Senior Style Bible site quickly became an anti-aging crusade. As a lifetime fashion maven, she had no inclination to retire her sense of style and desire to look great, even as she aged. And she found that others too were extremely receptive to what she had to say about looking and feeling great in spite of the aging process. On her site, she offers tips of all kinds for people looking to defy popular ageist ideas. Sure, she talks about fashion and beauty, but she also discusses nutrition, travel, what it’s like to date at her age. Dorrie’s mission has decidedly become one of redefining what we think of as Age-Appropriate. She wants us to stop thinking about aging as a number that can slow us down but rather as a number that we continue to grow with as it grows.
For Dorrie, her age is definitely not a game changer. As for her hearing? She knows she couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to, do without the hearing she experiences due to wearing hearing aids. She says she wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing much of anything without hearing aids. She would have stayed in more, stopped being so social, decreased her activity level, and declined in general, as she aged. She wonders, “Why would anyone choose to extricate themselves from so much of life by not hearing as well as possible through hearing aids?” She knows she owes a lot to Robyn at Hearing Associates of Las Vegas who continually keeps her apprised of the newest technology and makes fine-tuning adjustments throughout the year.
Want to live more like Dorrie? One of the best things you can do for your health is to add regular hearing evaluations to your wellness plan. Living with untreated hearing loss (a lack of or decrease in stimulation to the auditory nerve), even at its earliest stages, has been linked to multiple serious diseases including some confused rewiring in the brain that looks frighteningly similar to that seen in Alzheimer’s and Dementia patients. Remain nimble in all aspects as you evolve. Dorrie is proof that hearing well is fashionable! Call Hearing Associates of Las Vegas today to see how you can have optimal hearing to maintain an active and engaged life.
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