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!
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.
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.
If you can afford another pair of hearing aids, get some. But know that they too will disappear.