See a 5-Year-Old Deaf Boy Hear His Mother for the First Time
An autistic boy was calmed after hearing his mother's voice.
— -- A 5-year-old boy was soothed by his mother's voice for the first time after he was fitted with a cochlear implant.
David Orekhov is still adjusting to his implants, a task that might be more difficult because he is also autistic.
"It’s a little bit harder to get a child with autism to accept something that's new," Shelly Ash, David's audiologist at All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, told ABC News affiliate WFTS-TV.
The Cochlear implant works by sending modified sound waves directly into the auditory nerve.
But this week David was finally able to hear the voice of his mother, Elizaveta Kolbert, and for a second she was able to calm him using only words.
"David, you hear me," Kolbert told her son. He started to laugh.
"It's going to change his life completely, I already see it," Kolbert told WFTS.
David's entire family moved from Seattle to St. Petersburg to take advantage of the program at the hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Amy Burton.
Kolbert's younger son has similar issues as David and will be considered for a Cochlear implant at a later date.
As David gets used to sound, he will start to go to therapy to learn how to differentiate sound.
"He doesn’t even realize the difference between his noisemaker shaking and his mother’s voice," Ash told WFTS. "Until he can learn to discriminate those things, it’s a pretty scary experience."
Burton said David responded to the hearing aid well and even tried to put it back when it fell out.
"He was responding to the drumming and the bells," Burton told ABC News. "It was a really neat thing to capture."