Skip to main content

BR Parents Exceptional Lives: From Silence to Sound

Jill Gill’s birth plan didn’t include weeks of bed rest or an induction at 37 weeks due to pre-eclampsia, but when her son Tucker was born last February, she was glad he came early. Her eight-pound, healthy baby boy, however, failed his newborn hearing screenings, and an even more unexpected journey began for the Gill family.

Before more detailed testing, Jill took newborn Tucker to meet a friend at the Whistlestop Café in Denham Springs. “We were outside on the patio, and a train came by and laid on the horn full blast,” Jill remembers. “Tucker didn’t flinch.”

She says she knew then that Tucker could not hear. She and her husband, Jacob Gill, went into the auditory brain response test with that expectation. When Tucker was four weeks old, the family found out that he had bilateral profound sensorineural hearing loss.

Read the rest on the Baton Rouge Parents Magazine website.