A woman has described the emotional moment when she heard a human voice for the first time after a successful operation to have cochlear implants.
Jo Milne suffers from Usher syndrome, a rare genetic condition which meant she has been deaf since birth and her eye sight has deteriorated to just a narrow tunnel of sight in front of my face that enables her to lip read.
But last year the 39-year-old had a risky operation to enable her to hear.
Her mother filmed the life-changing moment on camera, which subsequently went viral on the internet.
In her new book, Breaking The Silence by Jo Milne, the resilient woman puts into words what it felt like to come out of silence and to hear her mother's voice for the first time.
An extract is published in the Mail Online.
Jo had to wait one month after the operation to find out whether it had been a success and on the big day.
Sitting in Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham waiting to find out whether the high-risk operation has worked, Jo battles her anxieties that she might be left bitterly disappointed.
She also recalls growing up and how she was nearly hit by a car when she was a little girl because she couldn’t hear it coming, and how cruel children spat at her and bullied her on the bus because they knew she couldn't hear.
When she is called in and takes a seat opposite the audiologist, Louise, her nerves settle and her heart starts to thump less hard in her chest, she says.
Jo waits patiently as Louise attaches wires from Jo's new hearing aids to her computer then carries out the necessary technical adjustments, a drawn-out process that takes a couple of hours.
Jo is asked to press a button whenever she hears a sound, then press it again when it is comfortably loud.
Once that is completed, Louise turns to Jo and asks whether she is ready for the implants to be switched on.
"My heart leaps to my throat. This is it. Every hair on my body is standing up, a feeling like electricity is pulsing through me.
"There’s a tingling inside me, a ringing in my ears, my arms, my legs, like no sensation I’ve ever felt before," Jo says.
Louise asks Jo "Can you hear me?"
The first words she has heard in nearly 40 years.
Hearing words for the first time took some getting used to, but Jo says every nerve felt alive with the new sensation.
Jo then externalised the voice she has had in her head by speaking aloud.
Hearing her own voice, she I put her head into my lap and sobbed.
"It’s a big life-changing day," Louise tells Jo.
After years of lip reading, Jo says her brain knew the shape and feel of spoken words even before she had even heard them.
But every day sounds - such as a ringing phone - were new to her and she had to process them.
After getting her implants, Jo immediately went to see a speech therapist at the hospital who gave her some words tests, which she successfully completed.
The therapist told her "you can hear".
And her mum burst into tears of joy.
Jo has since been getting used to lots of new sounds and says she has realised how noisy the world is.
She is experiencing new wonders, such as music, and not having to be looking at someone when she has a conversation, like she did when she was lip-reading.
She said last year after the operation: "The switch-on was the most emotional and overwhelming experience of my life and I’m still in shock now.
"I have to learn to recognise what these sounds are as I build a sound library in my brain.
“Hearing things for the first time is so emotional from the ping of a light switch to running water.
"I can’t stop crying and I can already foresee how it’s going to be life changing."
Breaking The Silence by Jo Milne, is published by Coronet on February 26, priced at £16.99.
For more information on Jo Milne’s charity fundraising, visit www.hearingfund.org.uk.