Deaf Family Joins Hearing World

ByABC News via logo
August 1, 2001, 3:19 PM

S T A N F O R D, Calif., Aug. 2 -- After being deaf their whole lives, Sarah and Todd McBride were able to hear all at once, with the flick of a switch.

The McBrides, who live in Menlo Park, Calif., received cochlear implants, $25,000 tiny electronic gadgets that surgeons embed in the skulls of deaf people to help restore some hearing.

After her implant was turned on, Sarah heard her father speak for the first time.

"I love you," he said, as he and Sarah's mother kissed her after the operation. Later Sarah McBride will hear her toddler's footsteps and she and her husband will enjoy music at home.

"So weird, so weird," Sarah McBride says smiling, as she signs through an interpreter.

A Medical Rarity

The cochlear implants do not cure deafness, but they can help the deaf communicate better, improving their hearing, and allowing them to improve their speech.

But the implants mean much more to the McBrides. Their daughter, Samantha McBride, was born deaf, and the couple wanted her to get an implant, so that the two-year-old girl would not be restricted to hearing aids, lip reading, and sign language, as they were. And in a medical rarity, the McBrides opted to get implants too, so that the whole family could hear.

Sarah and Todd McBride have never really heard each other's voices, never heard even their own voices, when they had their implants turned on for the first time at the California Ear Institute at Stanford University.

"I have no idea what it will sound like, at all," the McBrides said prior to the implant turn-on. And they have never heard the first words of Samantha either.

After getting the implants, the McBrides had to wait four weeks to have them turned on. They were nervous, and so were their hearing parents. For those with normal hearing, sound enters the ear, triggering hair cells in the cochlea, a spiral tube filled with fluid. Those excited hair cells send information to the hearing nerve, which sends signals to the brain, allowing people to hear.