Alum’s Father Finds ‘Hope and Light’ in Restored Hearing
HESP Grad Turns to Department After Medical Setbacks
HESP Associate Clinical Professor Nicole Nguyen helps Ray Hubbard attach the microphone-containing external component of his cochlear implant. Hubbard's daughter, a HESP alumna, connected him with the program that helped him regain the ability to hear.
Photos by Tom Bacho
Many new Terps choose a major hoping they can do something good for the world, but it’s likely that few expect one of the biggest beneficiaries to be their own dad.
That’s what happened to Tory Hubbard ’20, who became a hearing and speech
sciences (HESP) major after transferring from Howard County Community College.
Today she’s a Howard County Public School System special education teacher with
students experiencing a range of disabilities, including speech and hearing
impairments.
Tory Hubbard '20, and her father, Ray
Her specialty came into play in her personal life, however, after her father, Ray Hubbard, experienced sudden vertigo in 2022, followed by the loss of all hearing in his right ear, plus a substantial amount in his left ear.
“It looked like he was having a heart attack or stroke, which we thought it was because he had already had one,” Tory recalled.
Medical professionals the family consulted couldn’t explain what had happened, and more than a year later, Ray Hubbard still couldn’t hear. The hearing aid he got for his left ear helped only a bit, and hearing aids were useless in his right ear.
Tory took matters into her own hands and emailed HESP Associate Clinical Professor Sarah Sohns, from whom Tory had taken multiple classes as an undergraduate.
“You never know what students will take away from being in your class,” said Sohns. “I'm humbled that, by the impact of my mentorship, Tory felt comfortable reaching out to me many years after she was a student in my classes.”
Ray Hubbard works with HESP personnel during his implant activation.
Soon after, Ray scheduled an appointment to meet with Nicole Nguyen, HESP associate clinical professor in the department’s Hearing and Speech Clinic. Nguyen ran some tests, confirmed that Ray was a good candidate for a cochlear implant in his right ear, and helped him through the next steps—including talking with Ray’s insurance company after it initially denied his request.
David Eisenman, an associate professor in the Maryland Cochlear Implant Center of Excellence and an otolaryngologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center, implanted the cochlear implant’s transmitter into Ray’s inner ear on Jan. 27. Last week, Ray returned to the Hearing and Speech Clinic to have the implant activated, a process that involved attaching the microphone-containing external component to the internal implant magnetically, turning it on, and having Ray complete a number of tests to program the device’s sound settings.
The activation went well, from both Nguyen’s perspective and Ray’s.
“Considering I was going into it thinking that we may or may not be able to turn the device on that day, and we were able to get it hooked up immediately, the whole experience was wonderful and way better than I anticipated,” said Ray.
For Tory, seeing her dad regain hearing in his right ear was an emotional experience.
“My dad’s hearing loss was very hard because it meant he was going to miss a lot of firsts—the first words of my brother’s baby who's on the way, my wedding vows, and all of the other big life experiences of my siblings and I being adults in our late 20s to mid-30s,” she said. “With my dad getting his cochlear implant, it gives back a lot of hope and light to life again.”
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