by JO MILNE FOR THE DAILY MAIL

My guide dog, Matt, shuffles at my feet. We’re on a crowded train and I’m trying to build a mental picture of the other people in the carriage.

I smell a strong, sweet perfume. My fellow passengers probably haven’t noticed it — they’ll be busy chatting on their mobile phones or reading the paper. But to me it’s a clue. Does the lovely scent belong to a girl on her way to meet her boyfriend? Or perhaps she has a first date? I can’t see her, but I know she’s there.

I can smell coffee, too. I tell myself to be careful in case there’s a hot drink nearby. This is my life as a deaf-blind woman. I long to speak to every person in the carriage. I’d love to make eye contact and smile, to ask them about their day and chat about mine.

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Jo Milne (pictured) reacts as she hears for the first time when she had her cochlear implants successfully turned on

Instead, I sit trapped in a world that is getting darker by the day, a silent world interrupted only by the blurry low-level white noise my hearing aids give me.

My mind leaps forward to the weeks ahead. There is just a month to go before I have cochlear implants. The surgeons are confident they have a good chance of working for me.

They tell me that, at the age of 39, I might be able to hear for the first time the voices of those I love: my parents, my two sisters, my niece, my friends, my colleagues. It’s an incredible prospect. But it comes with serious risks. If the auditory nerve is damaged it will strip me of even the fuzzy noise I’ve come to rely on (a sound that’s a bit like what you hear when you’re underwater).

I would be plunged into the total silence I experience at night when I put my hearing aids on the bedside table. I’m overwhelmed by fear.

My mother is worried, too. ‘You’re OK as you are, Joanne,’ she says. ‘What if it goes wrong?’

But what if it doesn’t? What if there’s a chance that I’ll take out my hearing aids one last time and never put them back in again?

Jo, pictured with her guide dog Matt, suffers from Usher syndrome which robbed her of her hearing and most of her eyesight

I know that one day soon I will lose what remains of my eyesight — I have retinitis pigmentosa, another symptom of Usher syndrome, the rare and cruel genetic condition that robbed me of my hearing since birth.

Since I began going blind in my late 20s, I have no peripheral vision left — just a narrow tunnel of sight in front of my face that enables me to lip read. But is there really a chance that the doctors are going to give me back my ears in exchange?

My eyelids feel as if someone has attached lead weights to them. Slowly, with a huge effort, I blink them open. A crack in the ceiling of the hospital ward comes into focus, then a piece of strip lighting. A few moments later, a face appears in my tunnel vision. It’s Mum.

Jo Milne is pictured here showing the digital processors around her ear that allow her to hear

She smiles at me. ‘How do you feel, Joanne?’ she asks.

‘Did they do the operation?’ I croak. ‘Is it over?’ Mum laughs.

Two days later, I’m home in Gateshead. The specialists at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham think the operation has gone well, but I have to wait a month before the implants can be switched on. Only then will we know whether it has been a success.

Suddenly, I have become helpless. I can’t wear my hearing aids any more and without them the white noise that guided me through each day has disappeared. The total and utter silence is a depressing companion. It has accompanied me for so much of my life, and yet I no longer feel safe as it surrounds me.

Jo (pictured as a baby, with her parents) says her mother was initially worried that the procedure might go wrong

What scares me most is the thought of staying like this forever.

Instead I concentrate on any sort of distraction I can think of. I’m moving from Yorkshire, where I’ve worked for the past few years as a mentoring co-ordinator, to live near my parents and the rest of my family. I busy myself with paint charts and kitchen plans. Anything but confront the real question: will I ever join the club of hearing people, which has excluded me for so long?

Since I began going blind in my late 20s, I have no peripheral vision left — just a narrow tunnel of sight in front of my face that enables me to lip read. Jo Milne

We're back in Birmingham. Mum and I are sitting beside one another in the hospital waiting room. The patients are in rows as if facing the front of the class, facing a large widescreen TV on which is posted each of our names and the waiting time before we’ll be seen.

Joanne Milne: Ten minutes. I shuffle in my seat and see Mum do the same, though neither of us says anything.

Six minutes: Today is the switch-on day. A day I’ve been waiting for my entire life, though I didn’t know it.

Five minutes: That nagging fear just won’t go away — what if the operation hasn’t worked?

I think of other things. The fear in Mum’s face as she rushed out of the house when I was hit by a car as a little girl because I couldn’t hear it coming. The horror on the driver’s face.

The time I wriggled out of my pushchair on holiday in Blackpool while Mum was looking in a shop window. The frantic two hours she spent searching for me in the crowds, knowing there was no point in calling my name.

The fight she had to get me into the same mainstream school as my sisters. The bullies who spat on my back on the school bus, thinking it was hilarious that I couldn’t hear them.

Jo, pictured hours after the surgery at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham in 2014

Three minutes: I look up at the screen and swallow hard.

One minute: I’m looking down at the floor when I see a pair of black shoes appear beside me. I look up, see a friendly face appear in my tunnel and feel the vibrations of Mum getting up next to me.

In the times that I’ve been over and over this moment in my mind, it has all happened much more quickly. In my dreams, there is one button to switch on my implants. In reality, this is a three-hour appointment.

So, as I take a seat opposite the audiologist, Louise, my nerves settle and my heart starts to thump less hard in my chest.

Before she switches on the implants, she needs to align 22 electrodes in each ear with a computer. It’s a drawn-out process as she attaches wires from my new hearing aids to her computer. When she puts them behind my ears for the first time they feel cold and hard.

Jo, who is seen here giving a speech to raise deaf-blind awareness, has been going blind since her late 20s

It takes more than an hour for her to activate the implant and for it to start speaking to the computer. She does each one of the 22 electrodes in my left ear in turn, asking me to press a button when I hear any kind of sound, and then press it again when it is comfortably loud.

The sounds are just low hums, or beeps, nothing different from the other hearing tests I’ve had over the years. She checks and double checks, adjusting pitch and volume.

After the same laborious process is repeated over and over for each electrode, Louise puts down her pen and smiles at me.

In the times that I’ve been over and over this moment in my mind, it has all happened much more quickly. In my dreams, there is one button to switch on my implants. In reality, this is a three-hour appointment. Jo Milne

‘Are you ready for me to switch the implants on now?’ she asks.

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.

It goes all through my body, this tingle, all the way from my head to my toes, and then is swallowed up into the floor.

Every letter and syllable bounces off the walls, the ceiling, the doors, ringing out around the room, in my ears, and rattling round my brain.

The audiologist stopped speaking seconds ago, and yet sound lingers in the room, long after her lips have stopped moving.

‘Caaaaan . . . yoooooou . . . heeeeear . . . meeeeeeeeee?’

The first words I’ve ever heard.

My brain distinguishes every little part of them, trying desperately to keep up, to take them in and filter every new sound that has pirouetted out of the nurse’s mouth and hit my ears, exploding like a firework.

The sentence darts about and dances inside my head, every nerve alive with this new sensation.

Is this what I’ve waited nearly 40 years for? Is this what sound is like?

Jo, pictured with her niece, Casie. Jo said hearing for the first time was 'like no sensation I’ve ever felt before'

It’s almost beyond my comprehension. I’m hearing for the first time. This isn’t a white noise or a gentle hum. This isn’t the faint whisper of a huge belly laugh or a distant beat as my head is pushed up against a speaker on the highest volume.

This is me, Joanne Milne, sitting in a room, hearing for the first time. This is what it feels like not to be deaf. This is hearing.

‘I’ll go through the days of the week,’ the audiologist tells me slowly. And as she speaks again, my brain tries again desperately to process the words.

‘Kkkkk . . .’ The end of the word ‘week’ echoes in the room long after she’s finished her sentence. It seems to jump twice my height, then back down again into my ears.

Jo (pictured) had to wait through a three hour appointment when she eventually had her cochlear implants turned on, enabling her to hear for the first time

Sound moves, it’s all around, it’s not just something inside my head. It’s something I feel throughout my body.

My brain is alive as it tries to keep up, processing something it’s never had to before. Like jumping into an ice-cold bath on a sunny day, it goes from silence to sound in seconds.

The audiologist sounds how I’ve imagined a robot might. Her voice is high, squeaky and electronic. She starts to speak again as I nod to indicate I’m ready: ‘Monday . . . Tuesday . . . Wednesday . . . ’

I’m trying to take in the words, but it’s all too much. The excitement, the emotion come fizzing out of my body like a can of soda, my hands are shaking as the tears pour down my face, spilling into my lap as I try to take it all in.

Jo, pictured with her grandfather, says that despite never having been able to hear before she could understand the words being spoken to her

‘Thursday . . . Friday . . . Saturday . . . Sunday . . . ’

Words I’ve known my entire life, but ones I’m hearing for the first time. So ordinary and yet to me they are the most beautiful words imaginable.

Mum is standing to my right, filming this moment. I try to speak and I have this strange sensation from within. A voice in my head. My own voice.

‘It sounds very high,’ I say.

‘It will sound high-pitched at first,’ says Louise. ‘Your brain will readjust it, so it won’t always sound that way.’

I put my head into my lap and sob.

‘It’s a big life-changing day,’ Louise tells me, and I sob again, because the full impact of it is only just starting to dawn on me. I can hear.

‘Can you hear your own voice?’ she asks. I nod. ‘Good!’ she says.

Like lightning, the ‘oo’s dance around the room, whipping around my head and twinkling in the air above me. The ‘d’ shunts behind them, leaving an echo in its path. Firm, strong, hard. ‘Right, smile,’ says Mum, as she stands with the video camera. She has been my mouthpiece, my ears, my eyes, my entire life, and I’ve never even heard how she sounds until now.

My brain tries to compute the difference between her and Louise and instantly spots it: Mum’s Geordie accent. So that’s how we sound.

And then Louise starts telling me the months of the year, asking me to tell her how the volume is in each ear. By the time she gets to November, I’m sobbing again and I feel her hand on my shoulder.

The operation has worked. I can hear. If you could bottle joy at its happiest, that’s how I’m feeling. In all those years in my silent world, words were lost on me, strangers that I could only hope to befriend.

And yes, there’s an obvious question: how do I know what these spoken words mean, never having heard them before? It’s hard to explain.

Jo is seen here in her first school picture. Before the operation she could only hear blurry low-level white noise

Partly it’s because I’ve become an expert lip-reader and I’m using those skills as I look at Mum and Louise.

But it’s also more than that: all those years of lip-reading had taught my brain the shape and feel of spoken words even before I’d heard them. And now, suddenly, sound and meaning are coming together.

I leave Louise’s room a hearing woman. Back in the waiting room, my tear-stained face must be an instant giveaway that my life has changed beyond recognition in the last couple of hours. As the door shuts behind us, I hear the click.

Walking back to our seats I hear the tap of footsteps on the floor. Everything is wondrous to me, the tiny little signs that everyone takes for granted colouring my world, bringing it to life like I’ve never experienced before.

Like lightning, the ‘oo’s dance around the room, whipping around my head and twinkling in the air above me. The ‘d’ shunts behind them, leaving an echo in its path. Firm, strong, hard. Jo Milne

It’s hard to distinguish what the different noises are. If I look up and catch a man getting up from his seat, my brain has just begun to register that his chair makes a scraping sound as it rubs against the floor.

If I look over into the children’s corner, I understand that clattering sound is a toddler throwing toys back into a box.

Mum watches me, fascinated, and every so often the pair of us giggle.

‘What’s that noise?’ I’ll ask her.

‘It’s a phone ringing behind the desk,’ she’ll say, and as I look up, my tunnel vision reveals the receptionist picking up the receiver.

‘What’s that noise?’ I ask again, as a ‘clink clink’ sound passes by.

‘It’s a trolley,’ Mum says. ‘They’re delivering sandwiches for lunch.’

Over and over, on and on we go, neither of us able to wipe the broad smiles off our faces.

It’s like an ongoing puzzle. From moment to moment, my brain is working out how noise represents ‘that’ as I build a sound library. I have to ask people to identify sounds to me like a toddler would ask a parent.

I stare about me, fascinated by the world I’ve stepped into.

Our work for today isn’t over yet, though. A few minutes later we’re called in to see a speech therapist.

The sounds of the wind, trolleys and even telephones were completely foreign to Jo (pictured) when she was first able to hear again

She gives me a chart to look at while she reads words from a separate piece of paper. Each time I’ve heard the word she says, I point to it on the chart. She starts: ‘Response. Responsible. Responsibility.’

My finger darts from one word to the next as I look down at the chart. I go through rows and rows, over and over, and it’s only when I’ve put the chart down that I realise I wasn’t lip-reading. I wasn’t even looking at her.

‘You can hear,’ she declares. I hear Mum gasp. Those words that she’s been longing to hear since the hospital appointments she first brought me to as a toddler.

She bursts into tears and I get up from my seat to give her a hug. I can hear!

We leave the hospital an hour later and head off to get some lunch.

As we step out into the March day, the wind whips around the ground, picking up leaves and swirling them round and round. And I realise then that the wind makes a noise, a rushing whoosh of a noise.

‘That’s the wind, isn’t it?’ I say to Mum, my eyes alive with delight.

Jo (right), with sister, Julie (left). Jo says all the years of lip-reading taught her brain the shape and feel of spoken words even before she'd ever heard them

‘Yes,’ she says. How often must she have stepped out on a windy day with me and heard the same sound, yet here I am at 39, aware of it for the very first time.

We go to a restaurant and order pasta. It’s there that I realise just how noisy the world is. As Mum and I sit and chat — I still can’t get used to that — I hear the clattering of the kitchen, knives and forks tapping on plates, the hum of conversations across the room, the fact our glasses clink when we make a toast to my new life.

And then I notice something else: the sound of my own cutlery scraping against my plate.

‘I’m a very noisy eater,’ I laugh to Mum. She tells me I always have been, and yet I wasn’t to know that knives and forks make scraping sounds when they hit china plates. People just adapted around me.

Everything is wondrous to me: the fact that I answer the waitress when she asks if I want Parmesan, even though I’m looking down; the way my glass makes a noise when I put it down on the table too heavily; the ice that clanks around between the lemon slices in my drink.

Jo (pictured) says she had come to rely on the fuzzy white noise she previously heard, although she has always taken her hearing aids out before going to sleep

I thought drinks were silent. I thought glasses didn’t make a noise. I thought you could communicate with someone only when you were looking at them.

These are all secrets that the hearing world is letting me in on, and I eat them up along with my pasta. And when my tummy is full, my appetite for sound is far from sated: I could eat and eat all day long.

By the time we get back to our hotel room, my brain is exhausted from the effort of hearing. As Mum hangs her coat up in the wardrobe, I ask her for the first time in my life to be quiet.

‘Oooh, sorry!’ she says. And we collapse into fits of the giggles.

I take my cochlear processors off for a rest, and I’m instantly plunged into silence again. I pick them up and pop them back on. And there is sound: the squeak of the mattress as Mum sits on her bed, the whooshing of the toilet after she’s flushed it.

And then finally, when I’m far too tired for anything else, I take out my hearing aids, just like I always have done, and put them on my bedside table so I can sleep.

But as I close my eyes, there is one thing I can still hear loud and clear. The speech therapist today when she said to me: ‘You can hear!’