Mom Can't Help But Cry When Sweet Daughter Hears Sound for 1st Time
Emotions are funny things. Though we like to think we understand how they work, they can sneak up on us and catch us by surprise.
That’s exactly what happened to Anna Esler of Fort Worthy, Texas. As a mother of three children, she must’ve understood the gamut that one’s emotions can run when nurturing the little lives under a parent’s care.
She and her husband Will also knew they had a unique challenge on their hands when their youngest child, Ayla, failed her hearing screening twice. It turned out that she was deaf.
“We had to let go of some things, like her knowing the sound of our voices, the sound of music, the sound of laughter,” the couple said in a joint statement obtained by Newsweek. “We had to prepare ourselves to see her enjoy those things in a different way, through the vibration of them, to ‘hear’ with her eyes.”
Then Anna and Will learned something wonderful: Ayla was a candidate for a cochlear implant.
Not everyone who has hearing loss can regain some of that sense through a cochlear implant (or CI, for short). Applicable candidates, though, can experience quite dramatic reactions once they have a CI implanted and activated.
A CI plugs directly into a nerve, bypassing the hair cells of the cochlea, which is the inner ear. Studies have shown that people with such implants can understand roughly 80 percent of every sentence — a marked improvement over deafness.
Anna and Will knew the implants would work, but they weren’t sure what little Ayla’s reaction would be. “I thought she would probably cry and scream when her CIs were activated,” Anna said.
But that wasn’t what happened at all. A video recorded by Cook Children’s Health Care System that has since gone viral shows the tiny girl’s reaction.
In it, Ayla is sitting on Anna’s lap when a medical professional switches on the CI. The toddler’s eyes widen, and she shakes her head back and forth — once and then twice.
Then a beautiful beatific smile breaks out on her face and she begins to coo as the technician says, “Yeah, you heard it!” That’s the cue for Anna to start sobbing.
“Every child responds differently when their cochlear implants are activated, and so we didn’t know what kind of reaction she would have,” Anna later said. “And even though I knew it would work, there was still some doubt in my mind, so when I saw her responding to sound I was overwhelmed by thankfulness to God and to everyone else who has been a part of this journey.”
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