Ali, our bionic miracle!

Ali, short for Alexandra came to us a few years back. As the youngest of 11, she is quite clearly one of the highest maintenance of our crew! Some of this is just her type A ...that's A for Atomic!.. personality, some of this is due to her previous medical fragility...( she was born deaf as a result of prenalal CMV exposure...) and of course a wee bit of this high maintenance personality is due to the fact she is the baby of the family!

As I learn to negotiate this blog thing, I will fill folks in on Ali at a more in depth level...for now we are just going to touch on the briefest points...Ali is deaf and through the grace of God, and the marvels of medicne ...she is a bilateral cochlear implant receipent. She has real life bionic ears! She wears Advanced Bionics' Hi Res 90k implant with Harmony processors. She adores the implants and wears them every waking moment. The way the implant works, in a VERY brief non technical way...Lol...is the internal electrode bypasses the damaged hairs in the cochlea and direct feeds the auditory nerve. The most amazing thing is the way the brain is able to take in this computer language and translate it into spoken language...Nothing short of a miracle!