two things:
- you can be Deaf and have an APD; I had a friend at school who was and his situation was somewhat similar to what you're describing, OP. Hearing aid wasn't really helping him comprehend sounds, and sounds were also super overwhelming for him. so yeah, maybe worth talking to an audiologist.
- while there are people with APD who fall under the Deaf label, having APD doesn't make you inherently Deaf. i've got central APD and while yeah, it absolutely impacts my ability to understand spoken word... it's highly situational? and in the few situations i revert to hand gestures, they're the type of high-noise environments where we have job-specific gestures because even abled people need them. i don't lip-read or sign.
my CAPD really shows up more as hypersensitivity to sound. i don't think Deaf is a label that's useful to apply to me because my hearing is stronger than neurotypicals who are abled in a hearing sense.
there are lots of different symptoms of APD, and many peoples' symptoms are completely different, but "blurry hearing" is pretty far from my experience with it lol. so is Deafness. i pick up MANY many sounds and even after treatment, my brain doesn't really do much of the usual postprocessing work to discern what they mean. imagine trying to film a conversation in a noisy environment, then playing it back later. my hearing is pretty close to what that raw microphone sound data is like.
sorry for the word dump but i think "APD is a form of Deafness" is kind of misleading. it can be, and you can totally be both, but in and of itself it doesn't have to be.