COCHLEAR BYPASS: Auditory brainstem implants connect directly to the cochlear nucleus of the brainstem to restore some level of hearing to people with limited or no auditory nerves.COCHLEAR INC.
Shortly after giving birth to her first child, Julie Lopez found out her daughter was deaf. Angelica failed her newborn hearing screen. Lopez and her family, who live in Big Spring, Texas, drove five hours to Dallas for a second evaluation, and the test result was the same. “We were devastated,” says Lopez. “We did not expect it.”
No one in Lopez’s or her husband’s family is deaf, and they wanted their daughter to have a chance to hear. So they opted to try cochlear implants (CIs)—devices that involve threading an electrode array through the inner ear to stimulate the auditory nerve upon input from an external microphone and speech processor. But Angelica’s auditory nerve was too severely underdeveloped to make use of the implants, ...
