This is James.

Our James Michael is a wonder.

Born the third brother of our mini frat house, he joined our crew in 2018, and he delighted us with his loud, happy and opinionated personality right from the start.

He passed his newborn hearing test with flying colors, and the first year of his life was filled with smiles and fun. He passed all of his speech milestones on time, and was developing as expected.

At the age of 2.5, and at the height of the pandemic, he began preschool. Shortly after starting school, it soon became clear that something wasn’t right. Manditory mask-wearing removed the option to lip-read that James had started to rely on to understand people, and he stopped talking at school. His teachers alerted us to the situation. James struggled with chronic ear infections, and it was determined that his speech delay was due to fluid in his ear. He received ear tubes, and began speech therapy.

Progress was slow. Speech therapy didn’t seem to be helping him. At the age of 4, his annual hearing test results were technically normal, but the audiologist noted that something seemed off. Between the age of 4 and 5, his speech declined steadily. We could tell that he couldn’t understand speech. He wouldn’t respond to us if we called for him in a noisy environment. He stopped talking. We began to learn sign language to be able to communicate with him.

At the age of 5, James had a hearing test at the urgent request of our pediatrician, and the results were shocking: he was deaf.

This result catapulted us into a race to figure out what went wrong. Within a month, it was discovered that James has something called Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder.

Auditory neuropathy is a very rare hearing disorder where the connection between the ears and the brain is faulty. auditory neuropathy. It’s a rare form of hearing loss that affects the connection between his inner ear and his brain.

When sound goes into your ear, your ear receives the sound waves and then send electrical signals to your brain so it can interpret the sound. In James’s case, there’s a faulty electrical connection that developed later in his life, causing sound distortion (think of it like a sort of auditory dyslexia) and, eventually, total hearing loss.

Thankfully, James was a candidate for cochlear implants. He received his first implant in June of 2024, his second in December 2025, and began the long, arduous process of learning how to hear again.

Today, James is thriving and learning how to hear again with his two “Robot Ears”. It is because of the support of his incredible medical team, the CCHAT school and his hard work, James can hear at “normal” levels, and is now talking and hearing again. He is learning vocabulary, pronunciations, articulation and the meaning of words. He is learning to read, write, and can interact with friends in a way he has never been able to before. We are in awe of his progress.

He still has a long way to go on this journey, but his hard work and tenacity make all the difference. We are so proud of our sweet baby James.