Texas girl’s video diary chronicles her struggle to hear
by JASON WHITELY
WFAA
May 24, 2012 at 8:16 AM
DALLAS — It’s a very expensive procedure, but among modern medical
miracles, the cochlear implant has become another routine surgery.
Don’t underestimate what the life-changing device means to 10-year-old
Sammie Hicks.
“She doesn’t let anything hold her back… anything! Which is great,”
said Jen Hicks, Sammie’s mother.
The Collin County girl was born with a genetic mutation in her ears.
She was fitted with hearing aids at 19 months, then learned to read
lips after what was left of her hearing finally faded.
“I hope they learn that just because you’re deaf, doesn’t mean you
can’t go and do the things you want to do like most of the other deaf
people,” Sammie said.
That’s one reason she started keeping a video diary.
http://wunderlife.wordpress.com/
When insurance agreed to buy her a cochlear implant — a “bionic ear” —
Sammie wanted friends and family to understand her struggle to hear
first-hand.
“I’m excited for it,” she said in one video diary clip. “Still,
nervous.”
Surgery earlier this month was simple. But what happened next was
heartbreaking.
Another video clip from her diary shows Sammie jump when the
audiologist activates the implant.
Then the first thing she hears? Her own breathing.
“It sounds weird,” she told the audiologist. “Hey! I sound weird.”
It was an exciting, yet emotional, moment.
Seconds later, Sammie brings her hands up to cover her face as she
tears up.
“I started to cry because it was overwhelming,” Sammie said. “I had no
idea what the sounds were.”
“My heart just stopped,” Jen Hicks remembered about the moment. “I
can’t really put into words what it felt like hearing those little
things we never thought she’d be able to hear.”
“I asked her why she cried,” her father, Brian Hicks, said. “She said,
‘It was overwhelming. But the reason I really cried? I couldn’t believe
all the stuff I was missing.'”
No one really knows what Sammie’s life sounds like now.
“The teacher sounded like a robot — like every voice does,” Sammie
explained on one recent entry to her video diary.
Cochlear implants are not cheap.
The device alone costs about $27,000. Add surgery and therapy, and it
will cost more than $120,000.
That’s just to provide access to sound. Each patient will then progress
differently with the devices.
“This is what she has,” said her physician, Dr. Paul Bauer, as he held
up the device.
It does what her ears cannot.
“Inside of your inner ear are millions of microscopic hairs that turn
the nerves on and off, in very simple terms,” Bauer said. “And what a
cochlear implant is trying to do, is replace those hairs.”
Sammie’s cochlear implant is less than a month old.
Absorbing so many sounds now is exhausting for her, Brian explained.
But already Sammie has adapted, improved her speech, and still adds to
that video diary — hoping it helps others appreciate what so many take
for granted.
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Source:
http://www.kvue.com/news/