A little girl heard her mom say “I love you” for the very first time after she had her cochlear implants activated.
According to People, one-year-old A’deja Rivers was born deaf and lived in a silent world without hearing her mom’s voice, but all this changed on 20 June 2019.
Shelly Ash, an audiologist and cochlear implant team coordinator at the Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in St Petersburg, Florida said “Cochlear implant technology has come a long way since it first was introduced in the 1980s,” ABC News reported.
In the emotional video clip, little A’deja is seen reacting to her mother and grandmother who keep telling her that they love her.
Watch clip below:
"We’re all sort of holding our breath, seeing what the baby is going to do when she hears our voices," the audiologist explained. "Sometimes they cry because that's their only form of communication, sometimes they will laugh about it because it sounds ridiculous to them."
But much to the doctor’s surprise, A’deja handled it well. "She took it all in. It was a really neat moment when we could see her awareness on her face, her eyes lighting up” Ash told ABC News.
A’deja’s mom, Patricia Shaw-A’deja, expressed her gratitude and thanked God for such an opportunity for her little girl.
"All the love that I know she feels, for her to hear it, I know we all felt like, thank God, she’s able to hear us,” she said.
