Counting the Days Until the World Goes Quiet

Aug. 27, 2008 — -- Some sounds, like car horns and bad ringtones, are annoying. Some are soothing, like wind through trees or waves crashing on the beach. Some are smile-inspiring, like the perfect song or the laughter of friends and family. These sounds are the symphony of life.

But what if, a month from now, everything suddenly stopped and the world was quiet? Before they disappeared forever, which noises and voices would be savored?

For Jessica Stone, it wasn't a hypothetical question.

This winter, doctors told Jessica that to remove a life-threatening tumor lodged on her brain stem, she required a surgery that would leave her completely deaf.

With the surgery scheduled for April, Jessica, 23, was forced to prepare for a world without sound, and decided to keep a video diary of her last month of hearing.

"The deafness thing -- I will find some funky, quirky way to make it work for me," Jessica told "Good Morning America" shortly after she got the diagnosis. "To be the person in the family where they are like, 'Wow, she's deaf, but she does it so well!'"

"GMA" sat down with Jessica recently, now living in her own cone of silence, her old iPod now useless and her Blackberry now used solely for texting. She can no longer hear the bongos that she loved to play, but she still pounds away on them, tracking the beat through the vibrations they cause. And Jessica is still smiling.

Here is how she coped with the transition from a wonderfully noisy world to a silent one.

Just days after being told she would soon be living without a soundtrack, Jessica started living -- and listening -- like never before.

Since she was a little girl in her hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich., Jessica had been no stranger to surgeries. At age 15 she was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic disorder that causes benign tumors to grow along her nervous system. In all, she has had more than 20 surgeries to remove the tumors and battle the disease.

"I'm like, OK, I have this disease that I can't pronounce and I don't really understand it," she told "GMA." "To me, the diagnosis was pretty much a kick in the gut."

Her mother, Cindy Stone, was hit just as hard by the news, but was inspired by her child's courage.

"Since this whole thing started eight years ago," she said, "I want to crawl up and cry, and I can't. I can't do it because she doesn't do it."

When Jessica found out about the latest tumor and the consequences of its removal, the emotional weight got even heavier.

"[I'm] really at a loss for emotions -- freaked out actually, to be very blunt. Freaked out," she said in a video diary.