Cindy and Scott Roller of Sparks, Nevada, learned their baby boy Carson lacked the ability to hear when he was born. “At the hospital they found Carson was totally deaf because of a hereditary condition,” says his mother, Cindy.
Sometimes a child who is born with good hearing and passes the screening test later loses the ability to hear. It happened that way for little Maya Thompson of Ventura, California, when she was nine months old.
“We still don’t know what the actual cause of her hearing loss was,” says Maya’s mother, Diana, who links it to a tumble Maya took soon after she began walking. “Maya tripped headfirst into the kitchen counter. The hospital treated her for concussion and sent her home a few days later, telling us everything was fine. But within a few hours, I realized Maya was not responding to the sound of my voice.”
Shock is an entirely normal response to the discovery that a son or daughter has no hearing. “I was devastated,” confides Helen Cartwright of Phoenix. “I cried the entire rest of the day after being given the news. It broke my heart to think my daughter Emmy (Emily) would never be able to sing songs like her older sister Cassie, whose hearing is fine.”
Cindy Roller experienced much the same reaction when word came of Carson’s condition. “It hit me hard,” she says. “I even went into denial over it for a while.” Cindy’s husband Scott, a musician with a successful country-western rock band, was on tour in Texas as the news arrived via a phone call from Cindy. “I felt like I’d just been told someone in my family had passed away,” he recounts. “I think what made it so much worse was that I was a thousand miles from home and couldn’t be there to hold and comfort Cindy.”
Diana Thompson says she felt frustration, mainly over the fact that nobody could tell her why this had happened to Maya. “I was really angry,” she says. “I also had feelings of guilt. Maya is my baby, and my instinct is to protect her from bad things. But, in this situation, I couldn’t protect her. And I felt that I had let her down.”
The amount of time parents spend in anguish over the news of their child’s hearing loss may vary. For example, it took just a day or two for the Cartwrights to collect themselves and set out to investigate how to put Emmy on the path to hearing. “We’re pretty resilient people,” says dad, Trevor Cartwright, a builder of hot-rod Corvettes for the racing circuit. “As we began looking into the options ahead of us, we didn’t know where the journey would end—all we knew was we needed to reach the destination as quickly as possible for Emmy’s sake.”
What Trevor means is that the longer it takes to address hearing loss, the more delayed in communication your child becomes. And the more delayed his or her language development, the harder it is for your son or daughter to interact successfully with you and others in his or her environment. Aware that just such a clock was ticking for Emmy, Helen tried to learn as much as she could about the choices available—everything from programs that teach deaf infants to talk and use sign language, to the latest in hearing aids and cutting-edge medical interventions.
In the course of doing their homework, the Cartwrights discovered cochlear implants. “We were astounded that these things even existed,” says Trevor. “It seemed to me almost immediately that the cochlear implant was the only approach that was going to produce the kind of results we wanted for our child.”
The Rollers, meanwhile, came to a similar conclusion about cochlear implants when told of them by two of Cindy’s special education department colleagues. Says Cindy, “They came up to me one day and told me we would be doing Carson a tremendous favor by looking into this.” Cindy did so by pouring through journals from her own field and from the field of medicine in search of detailed information about cochlear implants. She also spoke to doctors and audiologists at a pair of highly respected hearing clinics in California.
The trail ultimately led Cindy to Advanced Bionics. “The company was exceptionally helpful in providing us an incredible amount of information about cochlear implants: what they are, how they enable children who are profoundly deaf to hear—basically, everything we could think to ask, Advanced Bionics directly supplied us with the answers or steered us to experts for more detailed responses,” she says.
Truly remarkable though cochlear implants are, they’re not given to just anybody who asks. Your child first must be thoroughly evaluated to see whether he or she is a good candidate to receive one.
Typically, doctors will look at every aspect of your child’s development, as well as his or her overall physical condition. They will take a series of MRI scans of his or her head, and perform many different tests of his or her speech abilities and capacity for hearing.
Cochlear implants are put in place through a procedure that involves surgery. The operation has been performed countless times in leading hospitals across the country, so doctors today are highly skilled in it. Still, many parents find the notion of surgery for their child a frightening prospect. Diana Thompson confesses that this is why she and husband Rich initially opposed having Maya receive a cochlear implant.
What changed the Thompsons’ minds were the facts about cochlear implants. Through information supplied by Advanced Bionics’ Bionic Ear Association (BEA) and other organizations, they became aware of the impressive, well-documented record of success surrounding cochlear implants. “We decided to go ahead with the surgery,” says Diana. “We were able to make that decision once we stopped looking at it from the standpoint of Are we ready to let Maya be operated on? and start looking at it from the standpoint of Is this going to help Maya? The answer was, yes, this is going to help her. It’s going to open all kinds of doors for her.”
After learning all they could about cochlear implants, the Thompsons felt the time was right to start the next leg of Maya’s journey to hearing—to get the device placed in her ear.
“It was hard for us to imagine Maya growing up with limitations,” says Diana. “Rich and I always assumed she would be the perfect child who would become a famous doctor or lawyer or star athlete. It was a rude awakening to discover Maya couldn’t hear. But now we had the chance to do something to correct that.”
Scott Roller echoes the Thompsons’ thinking. “You always hear people saying they’d do anything for their kids. Well, where hearing loss and cochlear implants are concerned, there’s no better time than right now to make it happen.”
The opinions and experiences expressed in these stories solely reflect those of the recipients interviewed. Results and experiences with the Advanced Bionics HiResolution Bionic Ear System will vary.
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