Gaining a sense of sound

Stares and questions are pretty frequent when strangers see the wire hanging from Ashton Hyman's head.

The 15-year-old Odessa boy can't explain what it is or the intricacy of what it does, but the device - surgically embedded in his head when he was 6 years old - allows him to hear voices that would otherwise be silenced by his deafness.

Ashton's mother, Kelli Lucas, doesn't mind explaining the teen's conflicting conditions or the complex electronic device that makes his life a little more normal. He's high-functioning autistic but profoundly deaf; and the electronic apparatus attached to his skull is a cochlear implant.

"A lot of kids ask, ‘Mommy, what is that on that boy's head?' I don't want anybody to feel bad for looking or feel bad for asking," Lucas said.

Born eight weeks early, Ashton experienced deadly complications as an infant, Lucas said, including episodes of flat lining, lung damage and severe pneumonia. So his deafness, which she said was the result of the pneumonia medication, was a better turnout than the alternative.

"It was either that, or he was going to die," Lucas said. "He overcame all of the odds and when they give you a 1 percent chance of survival, I figure that's a fair trade.

"My faith tells me God won't give you more than you can handle," she said.

With Ashton's hearing drastically impaired, Lucas said she and her husband researched the option of a cochlear implant - a surgically implanted hearing aid that converts sound reaching the inner ear's cochlea, into electrical impulses that are transmitted by wire to the auditory nerve. Dallas was the nearest location to get one and the total price was about $60,000, paid mostly by insurance.

"We put it off for about a year because we didn't know if we wanted him to go through it," she said. "We didn't want to be taking away who he was.

"You have people in the deaf community saying, ‘This is the way we're born, and you shouldn't change it,' but what really settled it for us, was if he's able to hear a car horn and not be killed, then that's a success," she said.

In fact, the device did save the boy's life at least once, Lucas said. Once, it enabled him to adequately hear a cry to move quickly, diverting the swift kick of a horse to the head.

Secured by a magnet on the outside of his scalp, Ashton's cochlear implant can be adjusted through its electronic processor or disconnected from the main insert by detaching the magnet. He cannot get it wet.

"He gets to chose," Lucas said. "He can always take it off and go back - it's like he's taking his ears off."

Ashton doesn't hold lengthy conversations, greatly due to his autism and lack of speech development, but his mom said he does mimic sounds or use his hands to communicate with sign language.

Kathy Hollmann, director of speech therapy at the Permian Basin Rehabilitation Center, said she's worked with about five patients who got the cochlear implant, but she wasn't very impressed with their ability to speak with it. 

"The kids that I've had before here haven't done real well," she said. "I think they just were the kind that were pretty well deaf when they were born and so when they got the device, it didn't make a remarkable difference.

"It just depends on what you were before - I think you've got to have heard the language," she said.

Paul Geers said his 19-year-old son Keifer Geers was only 2 years old when they confirmed his profound deafness. Although the son was a candidate for a cochlear implant, they decided against it - partly because the operation would destroy any of the residual hearing Keifer Geers has naturally in the lower frequency registers.

"Our experience has been that there are some people who really benefit from it," he said. "There are people who get good results with these, and then we see children who do not. It's kind of a mixed bag - it's really subjective."

Paul Geers said his hard-of-hearing father got a cochlear implant in his adulthood and has had success with the device. But Keifer Geers, who graduated third in his 2007 class at Odessa High and plans to study biomedical engineering at Texas A&M, hasn't chosen that route despite being recently confirmed as a candidate for the operation.

"I think it has to be a personal choice of the person doing it and the family. It's really a judgment call," Paul Geers said. "A lot of Keifer's identity is being deaf and so how he responds to the world is kind of tied up in that identity; and without a guarantee of any kind, he wasn't willing to take that step at this time.

"On one side I wouldn't mind him having one if it would help him, but he has to be a willing recipient before that happens," he said.

Lucas said she made the operation decision for her son, but he has the choice whether to leave it connected. Whether it's Ashton's safety at stake or hearing the sound of his mother's voice say, "I love you," Lucas feels like she made the right call to help her son's life.

"It's so different for each person - I think everybody ought to have the opportunity to try it. It can literally open up a whole new world," she said. "It gives them an opportunity to experience everything. You can't describe what a bird sounds like to a deaf person or the color blue to a blind person."