After two years of silence, young boy hears again

DUNCAN, Okla. (AP) -- Six-year-old Robert Reynolds heard his sisters' voices for the first time recently.

Robert, the son of Jack and Deborah Reynolds of Duncan, has had a cochlear implant.

"He hears!" his mother said, and laughed. "He was completely deaf."

After the surgery, they had to wait six weeks for Robert to heal before the implant could be activated.

"He is very happy," Reynolds said. "We were at my grandparents' house and he ran outside. I ran out after him. He just stopped in the middle of the yard, and he stuck his hand out for me to stop.

"Robert said, 'Dog. I hear the dog!"'

Reynolds said there were dogs barking, probably a couple of blocks away.

"He recognized what it was ... then he looked up and he said, 'I hear the birds!' I just cried. This is what it's all about,"

Reynolds said. "This has made it worth it."

She said Robert would have been deaf two years in January. It was two years ago that he had an ear infection in both ears and ran a fever of 104 degrees for a couple of hours.

"We couldn't get it broke," Reynolds said. "We had to take him to the emergency room. The way the doctors in Oklahoma City explained it, the high fever and infection completely blew out the nerves in his ears. It's a one-in-a-million thing."

Although the family lives in Duncan, Robert goes to school in Marlow for the deaf education program. His family learned sign language to communicate with him.

A doctor in Duncan referred the family to the Huff Ear Institute in Oklahoma City.

"We went up there and he had a series of tests, CAT scans, so many audio grams it's unreal," Reynolds said. They made countless trips to Oklahoma City for tests. They were told their son was a perfect candidate for the cochlear implant.

"He has two sisters," Reynolds said. "Marissa is 17 months old, and Reagan is 4 months old. He heard them for the first time Monday. He had never heard their voices. He was completely thrilled. He is just so happy."

She said the way a cochlear implant works is that an electrode was inserted by the doctors into Robert's cochlea, and he has a microphone that attaches to a magnet inside his head.

"Then there's a speech processor, so everything he hears goes in through the microphone, into the speech processor, and then it goes in through the electrodes in his ear, and that sends it to his brain.

"He's having to relearn everything," his mother said. "They are saying about three months with the speech therapists and his deaf speech will be gone."

Robert is working with speech therapists at Duncan Regional Hospital, at school and in Oklahoma City.

"I wanted to let anyone who had ever contemplated this kind of surgery for their child know that it's the right thing to do,"

Reynolds said. "It's awesome -- it's truly awesome. We prayed for a miracle and this is where our miracle is."