Cheerful sounds of sadness

Maria Borysenko needs a cochlear implant to hear. The girl is three years old. She has sensorineural hearing loss of the fourth degree. This means that the girl does not hear almost anything, even with hearing aids. This means that she will not learn to speak unless she has been able to implant in her head special devices, an invention that turned deafness into a curable disease before she was five years old, and dumbness due to deafness made it impossible. With her deafness, three years is the extreme age when the child can still be taught to speak, giving him the ability to hear.

It is believed that by the age of five, the human brain usually loses this ability if the child has not been able to talk before. Doctors say that Mary still has very little time. In the evening, when it's time to sleep, Maria takes off not only clothes, like all other children but also a hearing aid attached behind her ear. And immersed in an unimaginable silence. Before falling asleep, the girl talks to herself for a long time, because she loves and very much wants to talk. Only she does not talk with words, like all other children, but with babbling. In her babble you can make out intonation: here she is asking for something, here she is showing off, here she is upset, here she is angry and swears. Hearing aids, terribly distorting the sound, from the whole human speech around, reliably inform the girl only intonation. Therefore, she learned to speak intonations, but no words.

From the words Maria only knows "moms", "av-av" and "am-am." In her endless studies with a speech therapist and speech therapist, Maria almost can not learn the letters, since the hearing aid does not convey a clear sound to her. She learns to read and write, remembering the whole words. She already unmistakably puts on the card a card with the word "mother" next to the picture depicting her mother, and the card with the word "cow" unmistakably puts next to the picture depicting a cow. Pronounce the words she also learns entirely, relying on the intonation pattern, and not on the sounds from which the word is composed. This is a huge job - to teach the deaf person to talk: the deaf person repeats the intonation, and the doctor painstakingly places the lips and the child's tongue on the bends of the intonation. For Maria, this means that she can get into a boarding school for deaf-mutes for a hundred kilometers from home, if not to make her a cochlear implantation. And if you make a cochlear implant, she will go to a regular school.

Mother Mary, Catherine, says that, most likely, deafness came from some antibiotics, which were injected into the girl in the hospital. "Masha was born on the 28th week. We hung 970 grams. I could not breathe on my own. After a long stay in hospitals, we underwent rehabilitation courses in neurology. My daughter could not stand on her feet for a long time. But thanks to rehabilitation and home massage at 1.9 years old took the first steps. Now he walks almost independently, - Catherine recalls. - During treatment in intensive care, the child was given strong antibiotics. They gave a complication on the ears. Now the daughter does not hear anything at all. Masha was put hearing aids, but with this diagnosis they do not help. Only cochlear implantation is needed".

Name: Borysenko Maria, 04.05.2014

City: Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region

Diagnosis: bilateral sensory-neural deafness of the 4th degree