Meet Grace Tern

Listening to 11 year old Grace's piano performances and energetic conversations, it's hard to believe that she is profoundly hearing impaired.

Grace's academic achievements certainly surpass many of her normal hearing peers. Ranked among Singapore's top 1% of students, she is learning English, Chinese and French, plays the piano at grade 5 leve, practices grade 3 ballet, fences, excels in Chinese calligraphy and floral arrangement, and loves to read.

Grace's mother shares her inspirational story:

"When we first discovered Grace was profoundly hearing impaired we despaired about her future. We thought she would be confined to just signing as a means of communication. Then a friend told us about cochlear implants.

As part of our research into this technology, we discovered that profoundly hearing impaired children using hearing aids don't articulate as well as those using cochlear implants. The cochlear implant recipients seemed to be able to access speech better, and they also pronounced better. So we decided to explore this option.

We went ahead with the operation when Grace was 1 year old.

In the days after switch on, I knew she was understanding me because she would give actions to familiar nursery rhymes. Speech followed and, within a year, she was tracking like a normal child.

Now, at 10 years, she's as normal as a normal child can be. She goes out to McDonalds and orders a hamburger like any other kid!

Grace had a bilateral implant when she was 8 years old, and this has really helped with localising sound. If you ask her, she would tell you she hears better with two ears, rather than one. In fact, she's so used to it that if she only has one speech processor on she naturally asks for the other.

Our recommendation to parents who are considering bilateral implants is to go for it while the child is young. Playing the catch-up game was tough and if Grace had been implanted earlier, we believe she would have received the benefits earlier too."

"My life would be very different without cochlear implants because without them I can only hear very loud sounds like thunder. Without my implants, I can't hear voices and that makes it very hard to communicate!" - Grace