Read: Deaf writer Sophie Woolley’s article about having a cochlear implant

Deaf writer and actress Sophie Woolley has written an insightful article for the Mail about how having a cochlear implant has made a difference to her life.

Woolley was deafened in her 20s, and deafness runs in her family. She describes in her article how she felt when she was able to hear her husband’s voice, and music, again.

It’s well worth a read.

Extract:

My hands were shaking as I dialled my husband’s number. It had, after all, been almost ten years since I’d last heard Tom’s voice.

‘Hello Sophie,’ he said, sounding just as he had the first time we met, at a party in 2000. We both started to laugh with joy, so loudly that I nearly missed hearing him say: ‘I love you.’

Those words usually passed between us in sign language. I had been profoundly deaf for several years, and we had come to rely on signing to communicate.

Tom’s voice wasn’t the only sound I’d missed desperately in that time. I missed hearing my dad play his violin, the splashing of water in a shower, even hearing myself sing.

I could hear when I was born but began to go deaf in my teens. As I approached my 39th birthday last summer, I was somewhere between profoundly and totally deaf.

But the flick of a techno-switch on the cochlear implant fitted in my skull finally transported me back to a lost world; a place where cats purred, sirens screeched and pebbles clinked on the beach.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2442130/Deaf-writer-Sophie-Woolleys-cochlear-implant-regained-hearing.html#ixzz2geMMwtPq