On Valentine’s Day our daughter, Veronica, was born a healthy six pound baby.  Our pediatrician notified us that Veronica was born with a white forelock, which is a white patch of hair just above her forehead.  He informed us that this could be a syndrome, which is linked to hearing loss.  Veronica passed her newborn hearing test, referred to as an OAE, otoacoustic emissions test.

After a few months, we noticed Veronica was not startled by loud noises and sometimes didn’t turn toward our voices when we entered her room.  So, when she was five months old, we decided to get another OAE test.  She passed.  Another few months went by and she was growing and hitting all her milestones, but we still questioned her hearing.

At ten months we took her to a children’s hospital for an ABR, Auditory Brainstem Response.  This is more of a gold standard of tests for hearing loss.  They had to sedate her and the test took about one hour.  When the technician had finished the test, she turned her chair around and said, “Your daughter is profoundly deaf and she probably has been since birth.”

That day the children’s hospital sent us home with an overwhelming amount of information.  That’s when we started our extensive research on hearing loss.  My husband, being a physician, questioned whether Veronica would be a candidate for a cochlear implant.  We also knew a family whose daughter had a cochlear implant and attended an oral deaf school in St. Louis.  I phoned them immediately.

We later learned that the OAE machine at the local hospital was not properly calibrated and for two years every infant was passing its hearing test.  Every child in that time frame had to be retested.

A short time after we found out Veronica was deaf, we met with the director of the Moog Center for Deaf Education and immediately knew this was the school for her.  After careful research, a two-month hearing aid trial and guidance from the Moog Center, we decided on a cochlear implant for Veronica.  At fourteen months she was implanted with a Nucleus 24 implant.  One month after she was implanted the device was turned on.  A day of surprise for Veronica – the birth of her hearing.

It took some time for Veronica to actually speak.  We were eager to hear her voice.  The school said the words would come and to be patient.  One year later after implantation, activation and training from the Moog Center, she did speak her first words.  Veronica is now a spunky four-year-old.  She is constantly talking.  She loves music, and her speech is music to our ears.

Before our daughter, Caroline, was born, we were aware that she might be deaf since I was also born deaf.  Shortly after her birth, the hospital performed a series of hearing tests on her to which she did not respond.  Anxious to verify whether or not she did have a hearing loss, we immediately had her tested by an audiologist who confirmed that she indeed did suffer from a severe sensorineural hearing loss.  Although it was not the answer we had hoped for, we were grateful that we knew the answer right away.  We also knew that we needed to do something soon in terms of her educational needs to prepare her for her future.

When I was Caroline’s age, cochlear implants were not sufficiently advanced to provide me with any significant assistance.  And I was never able to benefit very much from my hearing aids since my hearing was so profound — more than 100dB loss.  I was educated primarily by oral methods and relied mainly on reading lips.  Lipreading was my foremost means of receiving information combined with the little bits of hearing that my hearing aids provided me.

I soon learned that my experience with being deaf, which was so familiar to me, was going to be very different from Caroline’s experience!

We looked into what was available in the Los Angeles area for hearing-impaired infants and selected the John Tracy Clinic.  One of the first things I noticed was that almost all of the children had cochlear implants.  This was my first introduction to how much technology in cochlear implants had grown.  As I watched the videos about the cochlear implant at the parent meetings, I was fascinated and intrigued.

We decided that we would have Caroline evaluated for an implant and I also decided to get an implant myself so that I would be able to relate better to her experiences.  On July 25, 2002, I was implanted with the Clarion Platinum Series by Advanced Bionics at the House Ear Institute.  Later, on August 22, 2002, I was hooked up and wired to hear the new exciting sounds I had never heard before!  The best thing I have ever heard so far with my implant was Caroline calling out “Mommy” as I was walking down the hallway!  Lipreading has never been so easy as after I received the implant.  After hearing all of these amazing new sounds, I was eager for Caroline to get her implant.

But Caroline’s approval for the implant was not forthcoming.  At that time Caroline was “borderline” since she had some useable hearing.  She was fitted with hearing aids and did respond quite well to them.

In 2003 we moved to the Washington, D.C. area, where we knew of a program we thought would meet Caroline’s needs, and with the change in criteria, Caroline was now recommended for an implant after all!

Caroline was implanted on August 27, 2003, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.  Lifting my little Caroline onto the operating table with the medical team all around preparing for surgery was the hardest thing I have ever had to do.  However, everything was OK again when she was wheeled out of a highly successful surgery a few hours later.  Her implant was activated on October 6 and she was well on her way to hearing a new world of sounds from that day forward.  It was such a fun and exciting day to watch Caroline’s first reaction with a surprised look on her face and her little finger pointing at her ear when she first heard sound from the implant.

The next step in her educational journey was to be enrolled in an auditory-verbal program.  However, it did not take long to realize that her exposure to language in that setting was simply not sufficient.

In November 2004, we went to St. Louis to visit the Moog Center for Deaf Education.  I knew immediately that we had finally arrived at the right place where Caroline would have the best opportunity to meet her full potential.  We are so happy and content that Caroline is now in the hands of a wonderful team of teachers who are providing Caroline with all of the tools she will need to function in the hearing world.

My wish for Caroline is for her to be able to function as normally as possible within the hearing world.  I believe that she will be able to do whatever she wishes to do when she gets older.