Watch a baby hear sound for the very first time and try not to smile. We dare you.
A video shared Tuesday by Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth shows a 1-year-old girl, Ayla Esler, hearing her first sound thanks to a cochlear implant.
Ayla’s joyous smile and her mom’s unbridled emotion make for a heartwarming scene inside a hospital room, where the whole Esler family awaited Ayla’s big moment.
Ayla recently had cochlear implant surgery and her audiologist turned it on Tuesday, the hospital wrote on Twitter. The Esler family is from Amarillo.
Commenters were unanimously in love with the video on Facebook.
“Rejoicing with you & your precious family!,” one person wrote. “Ayla’s smile says it all.”
Cook Children’s launched its cochlear implant program in 2006.
A child with a cochlear implant wears a receiver inside his or her ear and a sound processor – essentially a microphone – behind the ear or attached to his or her shirt. The processor picks up sounds or speech and converts it into “a special code” that is then transmitted to the receiver in the ear.
That code is then passed through the cochlea and ultimately to the brain for processing.
Watch the video in the player above or by going here.