Toni Trucks Says Her Hearing Loss Was 'Ignored' Growing Up. Now She Feels 'Empowered' Wearing Hearing Aids (Exclusive)

Every morning,SEAL team star Toni Trucks puts on her hearing aids — the new norm despite mild hearing loss since childhood.

The 43-year-old actress recently spoke with PEOPLE about how her hearing has been thrown off her over the years and why she now feels “empowered” to be proactive about her health.

Trucks was in kindergarten when she started repeatedly failing routine hearing tests. She believes her hearing loss is likely the result of a simple ear infection at a young age. Despite the results, doctors often dismissed it as a cause for concern year after year.

“Although the mild loss I have has always been acknowledged, steps to treat it have always been discouraged,” she tells PEOPLE. “You get results and then it’s kind of ignored.”

“I experienced a constant theme of a ‘shrug it off’ attitude like, ‘Oh yeah, you’ve got hearing loss, but come back to us when it’s worse. Come back to us when you’re 75.’ They put me on this shelf,” she says.

It wasn’t until a year ago, while helping her father with prescription hearing aids, that Trucks was first told there was a possibility of treating her mild hearing loss.

“I was talking to the hearing specialist and she said, ‘Hey, did you know you read a little bit of lips.’ And I’ve never heard this before,” she recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, I know I have a loss. That’s probably why I do it a bit.’ And she’s like, ‘Let’s go check it out.’ And the road started from there.”

Tony Trucks.

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A self-proclaimed “detective” when it came to her health, Trucks also decided to take matters into her own hands — researching and reading studies about hearing health and how it goes hand-in-hand with brain health.

“When I started seeing the latest scientific data and studies telling me that untreated hearing loss has immediate cognitive consequences, I felt a little more empowered,” she boasts. “I felt that I could do something to heal my hearing and my brain and to prolong my life.”

Trucks now regularly wears hearing aids and is always “armed with emergency earplugs” if she’s in a louder environment. He also tries to keep the ears healthy and lubricated with oil. The actress says that she has now become a person who educates all her friends and family.

“When I realized that the health of the hearing is equal to the health of the brain, I was completely convinced about taking care of my ears,” she adds. “You can get your hearing tested every year along with your eyes and teeth and any other thing we take care of all the time.”

Trucks says he knows some people are reluctant to use hearing aids — but, he says, the devices are more sophisticated these days.

“People cringe when they think of hearing aids in a way that they don’t cringe when they think of glasses or braces. A lot of people think of grandma’s hearing aids, where they fiddle with a small battery and there’s an annoying buzzing and ringing,” she says. “For some reason, hearing has a bad press. These are not your grandfather’s hearing aids. The world has changed.”

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Tony Trucks.

Ben Cope

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With the seventh and final seasonSEAL team premiering Aug. 11 on Paramount+ — which Trucks admits is “bittersweet” — the actress says it’s “both exciting and scary” to look forward to the new chapter. Part of that includes advocacy.

Trucks tells PEOPLE that she finds helping others “so empowering” that she decided to partner with a hearing specialist to start a hearing health advocacy organization.

He says the aim will be to focus on awareness, prevention and protection.

“I think our dream scenario is to update the recommended hearing health guidelines. More than that, to really try to change the stigma that comes around hearing health and hearing aids,” she shares. “You wouldn’t believe how many people I share my journey with, and they say, ‘I know I have a hearing problem, but I’ll fix it in 10 years or so.’ But what’s unfortunate is that the moment your loved one says the TV is too loud or you keep saying ‘what’, there’s probably a deep loss that you can’t make up for.”

“So a mild loss can actually be somewhat reversed and it’s exciting to know that you can take care of that,” she adds.

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Source: HIS Education