Emilee is shouting: Make sure the deaf get heard — and helped — early
September is Deaf Awareness Month, and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone shouting louder about it than Emilee Segura.
Emilee is 25. She lives with her husband, Jonathan, in their new home in Saratoga Springs. They have a mortgage, a goldendoodle, good jobs and a future that looks bright. Ask Emilee how she’s doing and without hesitation or a hint of an accent she answers, “Great! How are you?”
You’d never guess the day she was born she couldn’t hear a thing.
That’s the message Emilee wants to communicate to the world, and not just during Deaf Awareness Month:
Deafness doesn’t have to be a lifetime thing.
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No one had a clue Emilee was deaf 25 years ago when she made her entrance in the Provo Regional Hospital, five minutes ahead of her twin brother, Spencer. Certainly not her parents, who suddenly had their hands full. They might have taken her home still not having a clue if shortly after they were born Emilee and Spencer hadn’t gone through mandatory newborn hearing screening.
Spencer passed the test. Emilee did not.
Ben and Kim Cahoon were devastated.
“It was a really hard day,” remembers Kim. “At first all we could think about was all she’d miss out on, how hard it would be to be deaf.”
But then an angel of mercy arrived at their door when Emilee was 2 months old.
She was the family’s deaf mentor, sent by the Utah School for the Deaf and the Blind through its early intervention program. Emilee’s parents were soon learning American Sign Language so they could teach it to their daughter. At 6 months, Ben walked in the room and Emilee signed her first word: “Dad.”
At 9 months, speech therapy began, two days a week at Primary Children’s Hospital and one day a week at the Utah School for the Deaf — and every day at home. On Sundays, the Cahoons started attending a deaf branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If Emilee was going to be part of the deaf community, they wanted to be part of it too.
At 18 months, Ben and Kim learned about a cochlear implant, an electronic device that is surgically implanted in the inner ear. For those with sensorineural hearing loss, as was the case with Emilee and a majority of those born with profound hearing loss, a cochlear implant sends signals to the brain that allow the deaf to hear.
Emilee got a cochlear implant.
By the time she was 6 and ready to start school, Emilee was fluent in two languages, ASL and English, and if she didn’t have perfect hearing, with the aid of her cochlear implant she could get along in the hearing world just fine.
Ben and Kim let her decide if she wanted to attend her neighborhood school or a school for deaf kids.
She chose the neighborhood school, but it wasn’t as easy of a choice as you’d expect. By this point Emilee had one foot in the hearing culture and one foot in the deaf culture. She had an affinity for both. But it was a choice. That’s the point — and that’s the message she wants to get out to parents of deaf newborns everywhere:
Don’t waste a minute and don’t miss a step. Make sure the child goes through newborn hearing screening. Take advantage of early intervention and the deaf mentor program. Start speech therapy early. Consider a cochlear implant. Make sure your child has all his or her options.
“My parents are my heroes,” Emilee says, “they gave me the freedom to choose.”
She has made it her life’s work to help others find that same freedom. At BYU, she got her bachelor’s degree in communication disorders, followed by a master’s degree at the University of Utah in deaf education. Her full-time job is working for the Utah School for the Deaf and the Blind in the Parent Infant Program. She travels throughout the Salt Lake Valley visiting parents and their deaf kids in their homes, providing one-on-one instruction and mentoring.
On the side, she’s also an influencer. Her short videos, all dealing with deafness, can be seen on Instagram (@emilee_segura) and TikTok (@emileesegura). She’s just getting started and she already has 40,000 followers on Instagram and 46,000 on TikTok. Several of her videos have been seen millions of times. The most popular so far is one on TikTok of her husband “acting like his deaf wife” (2.6 million views).
“I just feel like I want to reach more people so I started sharing my story on social media,” she explains. “I have a huge passion to help these little kiddos be able to succeed in life, and make sure parents know how important early intervention is.”
The part of her job she loves most is when she first meets parents and tells them her story “and I see this relief come over them, this overwhelming sense of peace that everything is going to be OK. They’re meeting a deaf adult who can hear, and talk, and sign, who is married, who went to college and lives a very normal life. They can see what’s possible. I love being able to connect with families like that.”
To which her mother responds, “I wish I had an Emilee when I first found out I had a deaf baby.”
