Only her mother's persistence to teach her daughter by having them both feel her vibrating vocal cords in her neck and her mother's repetitive, slow pronunciation of sentences from Dick and Jane books helped the child to learn how to read and write.

At around age 12, Elaine Wilkin endured relentless teasing from her schoolmates, who would pull apart her hearing aids and ruin the batteries. When she went home, her father reprimanded her for the incidents that cost him $12, which was difficult to come by in the post-World War II era.

As decades passed, the trauma and medication related to surgery and two car accidents further robbed Wilkin of the little ability she had left to hear.

About a year ago, Wilkin found herself facing complete deafness. Her hearing aids were of no use.

Though a remarkable lip reader, Wilkin had completely lost any connection to the world of sounds.

But in August, Wilkin, 62, underwent cochlear implant surgery, the first procedure of its kind to be done in Pueblo, according to Dr. Robert McLean, a local ear, nose and throat doctor who performed the procedure.

Following a couple of weeks of recovery, McLean's audiologist, Sara Nulle, turned the device on.

Recalling that life-changing moment recently brought Wilkin to tears.

"I thought, I get to hear a voice for the first time," she said. "I was so overcome."

"What really made me happy is I had to go back up to my grandkids' school and my granddaughter leaned over and said, 'I think you are so special.' I had goosebumps, chills up and down my arm. I had never heard my grandchildren's voices before," she said of 5-year-old Zachary and 3-year-old Bailey Stallman.

Wilkin said her world is constantly expanding with words she's never heard before Ñ words like "cathedral" that she says she used to mispronounce.

She can't believe that not long ago, she had no hearing.

The surgery has "opened up a whole new world for me. I remember the first time I heard the clock ‘tick, tick, tick.’ To hear sounds like that, I'd never heard before.

"I can hear my neighbor's dog. I heard the wind outside my house. I was in my car and I heard thunder. It wasn't scary. I get so worked up about it. Here I am 62 years old, I have never been able to learn some words. I have missed so much.

McLean says he is humbled by Wilkin's reaction and honored to be able to do the surgeries.

"Being deaf is very lonely," he said.

Since Wilkin first heard sounds with her implant in early September, McLean said she has made amazing progress.

He credits his audiologist for part of Wilkin's progress, saying that Nulle is responsible for making minute changes in the device and communicating with Wilkin Ñ techniques that are critical to improving her range of hearing.

Wilkin is an eager student. An example: She quickly took a friend's advice to get a speakerphone so she could expedite her ability to understand phone conversations.

Many people may be familiar with cochlear surgery, the doctor said, since national talk-show personality Rush Limbaugh in the past couple years suffered sudden-onset deafness caused by a rare occurrence of one's own immune-system attacking the inner ear.

The surgery itself is extremely intricate, taking three hours and requiring him to very carefully find the auditory nerve and avoid the nerve controlling the facial muscles, according to McLean.

The procedure itself is costly. McLean said Wilkin's Medicare bill was $98,000, The implant alone costs $30,000 to $40,000. He said insurance companies, however, will reluctantly pay for the procedure.

Besides helping older people with severe hearing loss, McLean said he wants to provide earlier hearing screenings for infants to determine if they have severe hearing loss.

He said it is optimal to perform cochlear implant surgery on children 12 months of age since there are brain pathways connected to one's hearing ability "that either develop or close up" at age 1 to 2.

Until he purchased necessary equipment for testing, the closest test site with the sophisticated neonatal equipment was in Colorado Springs, McLean said.

Locally, he said, most children are not being screened for severe hearing loss until they are 3 years-or-older when they're enrolled in local schools. By that time, McLean said children have lost out on the potential of their critical early learning years.

WHAT IS A COCHLEAR IMPLANT?
A cochlear implant is a small, complex electronic device that can help to provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard of hearing. The implant is surgically placed under the skin behind the ear. An implant has four basic parts:

A microphone, which picks up sound from the environment.
A speech processor, which selects and arranges sounds picked up by the microphone.
A transmitter and receiver/stimulator, which receive signals from the speech processor and converts them into electric impulses.
And electrodes, which collect the impulses from the stimulator and sends them to the brain.
HOW DOES A COCHLEAR IMPLANT WORK?

A cochlear implant is very different from a hearing aid. Hearing aids amplify sound. Cochlear implants compensate for damaged or non-working parts of the inner ear and are viable for some people who are deaf or have severe hearing loss.

When hearing is functioning normally, complicated parts of the inner ear convert sound waves in the air into electrical impulses. These impulses are then sent to the brain, where a hearing person recognizes them as sound. A cochlear implant works in a similar manner.

It electronically finds useful sounds and then sends them to the brain. Hearing through an implant may sound different from normal hearing, but it allows many people to communicate fully with oral communication in person and in the best-case scenarios, over the phone.

Source: National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders