HESP Helps Alumna’s Father Hear Again

After a yearlong struggle to get help, Tory Hubbard ’20 reached out to her baccalaureate roots for advice on her Dad’s sudden hearing loss

Tory Hubbard transferred from Howard County Community College to the University of Maryland during the start of her junior year. Though she had always been interested in special education, she decided to major in hearing and speech sciences and UMD—a choice that has since reaped both professional and personal benefits.

Professionally, Hubbard works with students who have a range of disabilities, some include speech and hearing impairments in her current role as a Howard County special education teacher. And personally, Hubbard’s time in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences (HESP) recently helped her navigate a reality her family never saw coming: Her father, Ray Hubbard, suddenly losing almost all of his hearing.

“It looked like he was having a heart attack or stroke, which we thought it was because he had already had one,” Tory recalled of the 2022 day that her Dad experienced sudden vertigo and lost all hearing in his right ear, plus a substantial bit in his left ear.

More than a year after that incident, Ray found that he still wasn’t able to hear; no one he spoke with could give him answers on what happened, and the hearing aid he was able to get for his left ear only helped a little. In the right ear, a hearing aid made no improvement. That’s when Tory decided to take matters into her own hands and email HESP Associate Clinical Professor Sarah Sohns, from whom Tory had taken multiple classes as an undergraduate. 

“While I provided some counsel to Tory, it struck me that you never know what students will take away from being in your class; for most, it is their career path, for others it may be personal,” said Sohns. “I'm humbled that, by the impact of my mentorship, Tory felt comfortable reaching out to me many years after she was a student in my classes.”

Not long after Tory reached out to Sohns, Ray scheduled an appointment to meet with Nicole Nguyen, HESP Associate Clinical Professor, in the department’s Hearing and Speech Clinic. Nguyen ran some tests, confirmed that Ray was a good fit for a cochlear implant in his right ear, and helped him through the next steps—including liaising with Ray’s insurance company after it initially denied his request.

David Eisenman, an associate professor in the Maryland Cochlear Implant Center of Excellence and an otolaryngologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center, implanted the cochlear implant’s transmitter into Ray’s inner ear on January 27. In late February, Ray returned to the Hearing and Speech Clinic to have his cochlear implant activated, a process which involved attaching the microphone-containing external component to the internal implant magnetically, turning it on, and having Ray complete a number of tests to program the device’s sound settings to his liking.

The activation went very well, from Nguyen’s perspective, and Ray’s.

“Considering I was going into it thinking that we may or may not be able to turn the device on that day, and we were able to get it hooked up immediately, the whole experience was wonderful and way better than I anticipated,” said Ray. “My barber introduced me to a guy who had two cochlear implants, and his process went very poorly—it took him a year and half to get them to work because of swelling and infection and stuff. He was really informative in that he told me that the implant has a mechanical, computer-generated sound, and at first I thought ‘Eh, this is about as bad as he made it sound,’ but I am getting used to it already.”

For Tory, seeing her Dad be able to regain hearing in his right ear was an emotional experience.  

“My Dad’s hearing loss was very hard because it meant he was going to miss a lot of firsts—the first words of my brother’s baby who's on the way, my wedding vows, and all of the other big life experiences of my siblings and I being adults in our late 20s to mid-30s,” she said. “With my dad getting his cochlear implant, it gives back a lot of hope and light to life again.”

Tory added that her time in HESP “made this all a lot more comfortable to navigate.”

"I'm really happy to have the opportunity to support the family member of one of our alums,” said  Nguyen. “It's great that Tory had the resources to help her father when he experienced this sudden loss and that they put their trust in us to help him on his path back to hearing.” 

Learn More about UMD's Hearing and Speech Clinic

Photos by Tom Bacho

Published on Tue, Mar 4, 2025 - 2:38PM