Girl with hearing impairment reacts to hearing herself for the first time

Sarah Churman, a 36-year-old woman who was born deaf due to a genetic problem, got a hearing implant in 2011 and recorded her reaction when hearing for the first time.

The video, which was uploaded to her husband’s YouTube channel in September 2011, showed her in a medical center in front of a doctor with her hand next to her left ear.

After a few seconds, the doctor activated the hearing device and Sarah’s reaction was priceless. Only by hearing the first couple of words that the doctor pronounced drew a huge smile on her face.

Sarah couldn’t hold back her tears and the doctor let her cry for a bit before asking her some control questions like: ‘can you hear my voice? Does your voice sounds pretty loud?’

A surprised Sarah confessed that only her laugh was a bit loud and the doctor told her that she would get used to all sounds over time.

Her story became so popular on the internet that Ellen DeGeneres contacted her to visit her show. In there, Sarah explained that her parent’s DNA caused the hairs on her middle ear not to form, which made her deaf.

DeGeneres went on to ask how she could speak so clearly if she had had that hearing problem for most of her life.

Sarah said that the credit should go to the deaf aid school and to all the speech therapies she had. Apart from that, she confessed she was a ‘big talker’ and that she enjoyed reading books and pretty much everything else.

During the show, Sarah set clear that not only could she hear her children’s voices but also the snore of her husband, Sloan Churman.

DeGeneres then addressed him and his mother, Lari, who gave Sarah $30,000 to get the surgery and the hearing device.

The talk show host surprised the entire family with two huge news. She contacted the Envoy Medical Corporation – that was in charge of Sarah’s surgery and hearing device – and they agreed to do the second surgery for free.

Sarah is supposed to visit them year after year to get a new hearing device, which means that having the second one for free was perfect. The second surprise was that the same corporation gave her $30,000 so she could pay Lari back.

After that, Sarah has done her best to be as healthy as possible and even wrote a book titled Powered On.