PORTLAND Angela Douglas sat in the audiologist’s office at Oregon Health and Science University with a small processor clipped to her ear.

Her husband, Troy, and their three children huddled around her, watching her face for any reaction to the sounds in the room.

Angela turned to Troy and said ”Talk.”

”I love you,” he said.

Angela covered her face with her hands and wiped away tears.

”Wow,” she said. ”Wow.”

Then she laughed through her tears.

”You talk funny,” she said. ”I didn’t expect your voice to sound that way.”

When Angela heard her husband’s voice on that February morning 18 years after they first met it was the start of a miracle. The 36-year-old Bend woman was born deaf and had never heard her children laugh or cry or sing.

With help from a cochlear implant, Angela can hear voices and everyday noises that most people do not notice the humming of the computer next to her, the clickety clack of the keyboard as someone types, the crackling of the lights above her.

The implant was surgically placed under the skin behind her ear in January, but she had to wait a month before the audiologist turned on the sound.

Her new hearing does not compare with normal hearing, said OHSU audiologist Alex Hatton. A cochlear implant uses 22 electrodes to replace the job of thousands of hair cells in the cochlea of the ear. With the help of a speech processor attached to the ear, the implant electronically finds useful sounds in the environment and sends them to the brain.

At a minimum, patients with implants will be able to detect the presence of sound. They will hear speech and environmental sounds and see an improvement in lip reading skills. Depending on their degree of hearing loss, many patients may also be able to understand speech without visual cues and even use the phone.

The implant will allow Angela to hear high frequency sounds, such as bells, bees and birds, Hatton said. Most deaf people can only hear low frequency sounds, like the slamming of a door, if they hear anything at all.

But because she was born deaf and her hearing loss is so profound, Angela has no reference point to understand what different sounds mean.

”She’s basically at an infant stage of hearing,” Hatton said. ”She’ll have to learn what all those sounds mean.”

In a way that is good, Hatton said, because Angela can’t compare her hearing to normal hearing.

”I’m excited that she will be able to detect sound and learn,” Hatton said. ”I hope she will be able to use it quite well with her lip reading ability.”

The sounds she hears with the implant are real to Angela, not like when she tried wearing hearing aids and everything sounded garbled.

At the OHSU office in Portland, Angela heard voices talking in a hallway outside the office. She looked startled when someone coughed. She watched her mother pull a tissue from a Kleenex box and said, ”That makes noise?”

She heard her own voice.

”I can’t believe it,” Angela said with a laugh. ”I’m talking to myself.”

Her husband, who learned sign language after their first date and has spent 18 years describing sounds to her, said it was as if he were about to meet someone different.

”It’s like a miracle, really,” he said, smiling at his wife.

Angela’s three children were excited to talk to their mother.

”You’re the best mother in the world,” 9-year-old Shelby said in the OHSU office. The oldest, 12-year-old Clayton, joked that he’ll have to be careful about yelling and arguing with his sister and brother. The youngest, Zachery, 7, hugged his mom.

The family talked about sounds they can’t wait for Angela to hear even the unpleasant ones such as fingernails on the chalkboard and the thumping of the clothes dryer when the clothes are off balance.

But at times, sounds overwhelm Angela. She can turn off the implant if it’s too much for her.

”I think I need to breathe,” Angela, said, trying to concentrate on each new sound.

”The world is really noisy,” Hatton told her. ”It will be overwhelming for awhile for you.”

A lifetime of silence, interrupted by more than 20 unsuccessful attempts at wearing a hearing aid, led Angela to this point. Her family did not realize she could not hear until she was a toddler.

”She was reading lips before we knew she was deaf,” said her mother, Donna Attlesperger.

Attlesperger discovered something was wrong with her daughter’s hearing when she would bang pots and Angela would not react.

”I call it God forgot to turn the ears on,” Angela said.

Angela worked hard at communicating with sign language and reading lips in order to lead a productive life. Along with raising her three children, she works at American States Title Company in Bend.

”She’s an excellent worker. She focuses on her job so well,” said Katherine Zemke, the owner of the business.

But Angela grew tired of reading lips all day, and not knowing if people were talking when she had her back turned. More importantly, as her children grew, she realized she was missing out on important milestones. She wanted to hear her daughter sing in the school choir, her son talking fast and acting cool.

Family and co-workers encouraged her over the years to get an implant, but she hesitated. Implants are controversial in the deaf community, Hatton said, but people are starting to be more accepting of them. OHSU started offering cochlear implants in 1983, and since then 400 people have received them.

Some people believe that deaf people should be proud of the way they are, Angela said, that God made her this way for a reason.

But, she said, ”God gave that doctor a gift to do this.”

A friend who went through the procedure finally convinced her to get the implant. The friend described hearing the ocean for the first time.

Angela wants to hear the ocean, too, and the sound of the campfire in the summer.

”What kind of sound does that blue jay looking at me make?” Angela asked a week before the sound flowed through her.

To qualify for the implant, Angela had to show that she did not benefit from a hearing aid. She took a test at OHSU to see what she could understand with a hearing aid but without reading lips. The test showed a zero percent auditory ability.

Angela’s mother is relieved Angela decided to get the implant. She has always been super protective of her daughter. ”Now I can let go,” Attlesperger said, watching her daughter at OHSU. ”Now she has all the tools she needs.”

Back in Bend with her implant, Angela is discovering noises are everywhere. She had to turn off the microfilm machine at work because it was too noisy.

A co-worker sitting behind her sneezed and she heard it. The co-worker looked shocked when Angela turned around and said, ”Bless you.”

She discovered that she makes a lot of noise in the kitchen when cooking dinner.

And she was surprised at the sound of a flushing toilet. ”The toilet makes music,” she joked.

The phones at work sound different than she imagined. She had read in comic strips that a phone goes ”ring,” but these go ”honk, honk.”

She can hear lots of noises when driving around in a car.

”Do you know if you leave your window open a crack, it makes a whistle?” she said.

Sometimes she gets startled by a sound and can’t figure out its source. She has to go hunting around her home or office, looking for the noise.

Although she hears voices, she can’t make out many of the words without looking at someone’s lips. But she doesn’t have to concentrate so hard to read lips, and she is able to tell whether a person is angry or calm by the sound of his or her voice.

Even with her implant, Angela said she will always be in the deaf world. She attends an annual deaf camp in Stayton and leads crafts and other activities for campers. She can’t wait to show her friends there her implant.

Angela returns to OHSU on Monday to get her processor readjusted. Hatton will change the comfort and threshold levels of her implant to allow Angela to hear even more. Angela will continue to make frequent visits for adjustments as her hearing improves.

”I’m getting it,” she said of the implant. ”I want more.”

She admitted she cries a lot as she discovers her new hearing world. She just hopes she doesn’t cry too much, she said.

”I just look forward to many more sounds,” Angela said. ”I haven’t heard the rain yet.”

Rebecca Merritt can be reached by calling 541-383-0348 or by sending an email to Rebecca Merritt.