Most of us take our ability to hear for granted - but for many individuals who suffer from hearing loss, their quality of life can be substantially diminished. However, many young children in Southeast Asia have been able to rise above these inconveniences and achieve seemingly impossible feats.
Meet Grace Tern
Many would consider Grace Tern to be a prodigy. At just 11 years old, Grace is ranked in the top 1% of Singapore's students and is learning English, Chinese and French. She plays the piano at a grade 5 level, practices ballet, fences, and takes Chinese calligraphy and floral arrangement classes - she and loves to read.
Grace was also born deaf.
Grace suffers from sensorineural hearing impairment, a condition that affects the inner ear and the sound processing centres of the brain. Her loving parents, worried that little Grace would fall behind her peers, opted for cochlear implants that would allow her to hear. At age 8, Grace received bilateral implants so she could hear from both ears. "My life would be very different without cochlear implants because without them I can only hear very loud sounds like thunder," says Grace. "Without my implants, I can't hear voices and that makes it very hard to communicate!"
Meet Nihal Mirpuri
Nihal Mirpuri was lucky - he was one of the first children in Singapore to receive a cochlear implant to improve his hearing. However, even though he was able to hear sound he had never heard before, the process of moving from a silence to hearing was not without its obstacles. He found it difficult to distinguish speech from background noise.
However, thanks to an upgrade to a new speech processor, Nihal is now hearing better than ever before. "My tone and pitch discrimination have improved so much," he says. "I am the first trumpeter in our school jazz band, and my playing has improved by leaps and bounds," he remarks proudly.
Nihal and Grace are just a couple of the success stories that have been made possible thanks to Cochlear implants. This revolutionary technology is opening up new doors and opportunities to deaf Indian children in Southeast Asia that had been trapped in a life of silence.
0 comments:
Post a Comment