Bilaterally Implanted Jessica Is Rocking It At College
You must watch this video about a a college student who was implanted at 2 years old with one cochlear implanted and 7-years-old with her other cochlear implant. Her speech as an 19-year old is beautiful!!! And listening to old videos of her reading out loud as a child - inspiring.
Her name is Jessica and after initially learning ASL to communicate with their daughter, her parents learned about cochlear implants and wanted to give Jessica access to sound so she could speak. Hearing her father talk about how “devastated” he and his wife were to learn their child was deaf at a year old… I get it. It’s truly shocking. Part of the reason the Universal Newborn Hearing Screening was placed into federal law in 2004 was to make sure it didn’t take parents this long to figure it out. I mean Charlotte was screened at birth and it still took us 8 months to really wrap our head around it.
As for Jessica learning ASL first - YES, that’s it. There isn’t anything wrong with knowing or using sign language to communicate, but it is 2019 and your child CAN HAVE ACCESS TO SOUND THROUGH TECHNOLOGY AND LEARN TO HEAR! Of course there are different reasons that cause deafness. Some physical conditions may mean that a child may need a Baha, an implanted vibration based hearing device, but for the majority of the children born deaf, life Jessica and Charlotte, a cochlear can be their path to accessing sound and embracing the world around them.
Listening to Jessica speak so eloquently about “processing sound”:
“You don’t know how to interpret the different feedback signals that you are getting; so that’s when I had to have years of speech therapy to understand those sounds that you’re hearing.”
So now, getting into the fact she’s STUDYING GENETICS because her she understand her genes are the reason she was born deaf… Jessica is amazing. May all our deaf and hard of hearing kids be inspired by their journey and grow to help others like them be all they can be.