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BR Parents - Exceptional Lives: Thriving Theater Passion Follows Hearing Loss Recovery Journey

For 21-year-old Grace Graugnard, hearing limitations never registered when she was a child, even though she wore hearing aids and eventually received cochlear implants.

“I knew I was different and had to do some things differently,” she says. One of those things was taking speech therapy instead of P.E. “As a kid, I wanted to play dodgeball and not go sit in the classroom.” The time spent in speech therapy paid off for Grace, who majors in theater and international relations at Tulane University and applies those lessons to learning new accents for roles.

Grace remembers noticing her hearing limitations when she was listening to the High School Musical soundtrack as her mom tried to explain the difference between harmony and melody. Grace just couldn’t hear the notes. “I think that’s where I was like, OK, something’s up.”

Read the rest on Baton Rouge Parents magazine's website.