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I looked up this topic and found similar questions with no satisfactory answers. Mom is 92 with mid stage dementia and significant hearing loss. Every other day/week/month it's a new crisis. She keeps losing things at memory care: glasses, clothing, this that and the other, which comes as no surprise, given her memory loss and paranoia. Replacing her glasses wasn't too expensive, but now she's lost her second pair of $4,000 hearing aids in less than 2 years. This time she claims she was wearing the hearing aids while watching television, fell asleep, and and when she woke up, one of the hearing aids was gone. There is no telling what happened, since her short term memory is shot and she confabulates to fill in the blanks. We have searched for the missing hearing aid and looked in lost and found, with no luck. Her Memory Care facility doesn't take financial responsibility for such losses but has helped us look for them. To help keep up with hearing aids, staff are willing to lock the hearing aids up at night and put them in and take them out for Mom, but I know very well if we replace these hearing aids again, Mom (who has a will of iron) will strongly object to supervision by the MC staff, thinking it's beneath her. Mom stopped recognizing her memory deficit months ago. She thinks she's perfectly fine, in MC by mistake, and everyone else is a thief or a liar, or both! For caretakers who have weathered the same experience with their LO's, what did you do? I know it's very important for the elderly to be able to hear adequately, but at what point did you quit replacing lost hearing aids? At 4K a pop, this is getting expensive!

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You're at the point where you quit replacing the hearing aids. I went through the same thing with my dad when he went into a nursing home. He'd lose them and I'd frantically tear his closet apart, going through every pants pocket. I did recover them once and I felt so triumphant! Then within a month he lost them again and this time I couldn't find them. As you said, they're thousands of dollars to replace and we weren't in the position to put that kind of money out. My dad went without his hearing aids and the worst part of that besides him not being able to hear and us having to yell until we got a headache was that people who spoke to my dad thought he had dementia and treated him as such. He didn't have dementia but he was a little confused and foggy from liver failure. It broke my heart to see people speak to him that way.

If you can afford another pair of hearing aids, get some. But know that they too will disappear.
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To be honest even if you could afford to replace the hearing aids over and over again the staff at at facilities are not very knowledgeable or motivated to ensure that they are actually working - batteries need to be changed, wax and wax guards need to be cleaned often, even ensuring that they are turned on and off properly isn't a sure thing.
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There is another post running on here at present, with a suggestion for a hearing aid that isn't so discrete and so is less likely to be lost. A transister-radio size machine that sits in a pocket with a wire up to ear plugs. And also another amplifier aid that is much much cheaper ($25?). You could look for the post, or if I or someone else comes across it they could put it on this thread for you.

Chemist spectacles at $20 work well for many people, and several pairs are cheap to have around unless it is for detailed reading and unusual vision problems. Solving part of the problem can be better than giving up.
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My Mom wouldn't wear hers, even before Dementia set in. Her glasses got lost the first couple of days in AL. They were found in an empty room. I took a picture of them. TG I did, the hairdresser got Moms mixed up with another client's. Has Mom had cataract surgery? There r two ways of having it done...one you go back to wearing glasses, the other you pay extra to "see". Then you just need readers. If Mom had the second one, call her doctor and see what strength she needs in readers. Then just purchase some cheap ones. Places like Sams and BJs have pkgs of 3.

I agree, I wouldn't spend that kind of money on new hearing aides. Its going to be an ongoing problem. To tell you the truth, even the pocket amplifier she may not like. I personally, don't like ear buds and anything new is hard for a Dementia person to understand. I know, you want her to hear but even if she did, they no longer can process what is being said anyway.

Moms hearing doctor visited one of his patients in a NH. She complained about not being able to hear with her hearing aid. He opened up the battery compartment and there was no battery. He found that the aides took the aids every night and kept them at the nurses station putting them back in the ears of the residents next morning. He went to the station and told the nurse that hearing aides don't work without batteries.
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