Brandy B. looks back on the journey from learning about cochlear implants to getting her child, Amanda, bilateral Cochlear™ implants. Amanda now lives a normal teenage life and is looking forward to her future college endeavors and hopefully continuing her softball career:
“Amanda, now 15 years old, was born profoundly deaf and not diagnosed until the age of 7 months. She was born with the Connexin 26 syndrome. Amanda received her first Cochlear implant at 16 months old and received her second Cochlear implant about a year later.
Learning about cochlear implants
We decided upon the Cochlear brand after many sessions with one of her speech therapists whom had a son that was also deaf and had gone through the same process; he was making great strides. They had great success with our local university’s audiology department and their tremendous surgical staff.
The Cochlear brand was also recommended to us by the university’s audiology department. The success rate was extremely high and the failure rate extremely low and of course that is the road you want your child to travel.
Our journey to cochlear implants
Our journey was difficult in the beginning, similar to all parents who discover their child has medical issues. We had many trips where we saw different physicians and specialists and that was very frightening. You tend to feel sorry for yourself. But with each trip to a children’s hospital, you see very difficult things happening with many children that are heartbreaking. That really puts things in perspective and knowing that we have a happy healthy child, we are quite thankful for that. We were also so happy when we found out that Amanda‘s situation could be helped.
Amanda is able to lead a completely (mostly) normal teenage life!!! I cannot imagine life without her cochlear implants. Her life would be so much more difficult for her with school and socially. We as parents are so incredibly proud of her accomplishments; she has worked very hard and is a phenomenal young lady in all aspects.
Amanda’s future and school life
School can be difficult for her, but she works hard at it and consistently carries a 3.7 GPA, along with an extremely busy life involving high-level fastpitch travel softball. We are all hopeful that one day she would be lucky enough to receive a softball scholarship for college.
So that leads us to the journey of looking for schools that would give her a degree in the field of speech pathology and of course to be able to play softball!
Amanda has had so many wonderful and helpful people in her life that she really wants to give back. And what better way of understanding about the struggles of being deaf then someone who has walked that journey.
As I said, life without her Cochlear implants would be so much more difficult, I cannot imagine how life would be for her. As parents we want the best for our children, and we would never make any other choice than the path we chose.”
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