From PEOPLE Magazine Click to enlarge
During her reign as the first deaf Miss America, in 1995, Heather Whitestone regarded herself as an ambassador to the land of the hearing. "All I wanted to do," she says, "was to send a positive message." But after she became a mother to John, 2, and James, 15 months—her husband of six years, John McCallum, 32, is a foundation director—she grew frustrated at being unable to hear her children's voices.

The youngest of three daughters of Bill Whitestone, a furniture-store proprietor, and Daphne, a middle-school math teacher, the 29-year-old McCallum (her married name) suffers from sensorineural hearing loss, in which the eardrum and bones are intact, but the hair cells that line the cochlea—the innermost part of the ear canal—are damaged.

In August she underwent surgery to receive a cochlear implant, a tiny receiver placed under the skin behind the ear that turns sound into electrical signals transmitted directly to the auditory nerve. Activated last month, the device has begun to restore the hearing she lost when she was a toddler. McCallum talked with contributor Gail Wescott about her transformation and what led up to it.

My family first realized I was deaf on Christmas morning, 1974. That was three months after I got out of the hospital following a bad reaction to antibiotics I was given for a severe infection—probably meningitis—when I was 18 months old. I was playing in front of the tree when my mother dropped a big pile of pots and pans in the kitchen, making a huge crashing noise. Everyone jumped out of their skin, but I just went right on playing. My grandmother shouted to my mother, "Daphne, I think Heather is deaf." Of course, my mother didn't want to believe it. She grabbed a pan and wooden spoon and banged it behind me so loudly that it drowned out the Christmas carols on the stereo. I didn't react at all.

It turned out that I had lost all hearing in my right ear and almost all in my left. At 2, I got a hearing aid in my left ear which I have worn all my life. With it, I can hear police sirens and the phone ringing. I can also hear the sound of my husband's voice, but I can't make out all of his words.

My parents wanted to equip me for the hearing world. Signing was not allowed in our house. They made sure I learned to lip-read, gave me speech exercises and sent me to ballet class—where I learned to keep time by watching my teacher clap out the rhythm. But I always felt different from other kids, and when I was 11,I begged my mother to send me to a deaf school. I spent three years at the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, which I loved, but I came home to Dothan, Ala., for public high school. I was lonely and miserable, especially after my folks divorced in 1988 and my mother and I moved to Birmingham. As a way of gaining acceptance and a possible scholarship, I entered a local beauty pageant. After I graduated, I entered—and lost—the 1992 Miss Deaf America contest.

I was crowned Miss America three years later, but it didn't get any easier to straddle both worlds. Deaf activists criticized me for speaking instead of signing. That hurt me badly. And the job stress was intense. I traveled 20,000 miles a month as Miss America, with only one day off. It was exhausting, and I have to admit that my deafness made things harder. There were constant receptions, rooms filled with people talking, which I heard as a buzz. It's hard to read lips in a crowd.

When people talked to me about getting a cochlear implant, though, I never was interested. I felt I was doing just fine—until one day last November when my firstborn, John-John, fell in the yard and scraped his head and I didn't hear his cry. He had somehow always known to tug my sleeve when he wanted attention, and learned to look at me when he talked so I could read his lips. But being unable to hear him and his brother bothered me in a very big way.

I started researching implants, and in May at Johns Hopkins Hospital I met Dr. John Niparko, who has performed about 900 of these operations. He warned me that getting my implant would be like being dropped into Red Square without knowing Russian. You hear a lot of sounds that you don't understand, but eventually you sort them out. At first it would be hard to interpret speech at all, because the brain doesn't know how to process it. I'd spent 28 years learning to deal with a hearing aid, and now I'd have to start learning again.

For a week before the procedure, I couldn't sleep. I'd never had surgery before, and I was scared. On Aug. 7 Dr. Niparko implanted the device in a small depression that he made in the bone behind my ear and inserted an electrode into my cochlea. The surgery took two hours, and it went well. By that evening I was eating clam chowder in a restaurant.

But that was just the first step. It took six weeks of healing before I could finish the process. On the morning of Sept. 19, I went back to Hopkins with my husband, kids, mother and mother-in-law to have the implant activated. An audiologist named Jennifer Yeagle hooked a hearing-aid-sized speech processor on my ear. Behind my ear, she placed a transmitter coil which fastens magnetically to the implant under the skin. At 8:11 a.m. Jennifer asked me to take off my old hearing aid. Then she started to test the implant, clicking out sounds from her laptop. "Anything?" she asked, but I shook my head, no. Then, faintly, I began to hear a series of beeps. "Yes, a little bit," I said. "Now a little stronger." After 45 minutes, Dr. Niparko said, "We've been making little patches. Now it's time for the quilt."

It was time to see if I could hear natural sounds. Though I knew it was probably too soon to hear my boys' voices, I was so eager that I gave it a try. I said, "Come on, John, say 'Hi.' Mommy wants to hear you." I wasn't surprised when I didn't hear him, but I started to get a little nervous.

Then, suddenly, Jennifer clapped her hands together. "Yes!" I shouted. "I heard that! I really heard that!" It was such a loud, clear sound. My eyes started to fill with tears. I said, "That's the first time I heard a clap in 28 years in my right ear." By then, everyone in the room was crying.

Jennifer told me, "You're on a journey, and this is day one. Keep focusing on each new sound. It will get easier." And she was right. Back in my hotel room, I was putting on my makeup in the bathroom, and I heard the bottles bumping against each other. I'd never heard that before. Then, when I put on hairspray, I heard it. And last night as I was brushing my teeth, I heard the water from the tap. The sound of it was like natural music to me. I don't think I've ever heard anything so beautiful.

Today, I can feel the cochlear implant, like a little bump in my head. It's like getting your ears pierced. It feels funny at first, but then you get used to it. I hear voices a teeny bit. I haven't heard my boys yet, but I know I will. It's going to be a long journey. But there is no end to what will be possible.