Mt. Blue Middle School supports student undergoing hearing implant surgery

FARMINGTON – Students at Mt. Blue Middle School showed their support for one of their own by wearing a hat on Friday.

At a cost of $1 for the privilege to wear a hat in school, a total of $440 was raised before 9 a.m. for eighth-grade student Mat Otte of New Vineyard who is to undergo a cochlear implant next week. If the surgery is successful, Otte will hear for the first time in his life.

Otte grinned as he was surrounded by students who crowded into the school’s gym for a photo to celebrate the fund raiser that will help with the back-and-forth travel costs to Portland for the procedure.

Otte will be the first teenager to have the implant surgery performed in Maine, his mother Bea Otte said. The surgery will implant an electronic device that receives signals and transmits them to nerves in the inner ear for the creation of sound.

Although the implant is normally performed on infants, testing has shown that Otte’s nerves haven’t atrophied, indicating he is a good candidate for the procedure. In what is expected to be surgery without a hospital stay required, Otte will have one ear device implanted during April vacation.

He will return to school after vacation without the device turned on for another month as the area around the implant surgery heals. Turning the devise on is a complicated process fraught with unknowns.

Mat Otte has not heard a single sound in his life. Bea Otte adopted him when he was 7 years old and since then she has faced several obstacles toward getting her son the ability to hear.

If all goes according to plan, the device will allow him to do just that. Just how much and what he will hear will require several sound adjustments, called mapping, expected through the summer.

“Mat’s going to be on new ground. All at once he will hear. How will he decipher that? What should the volume be? It can be overwhelming,” Bea Otte said. Those who have had the implant surgery say at first the sound is something like chipmunks all talking at once. Otte will need to learn what those sounds mean.

“They think Mat is a good candidate for the implant surgery. He will need to work hard and always gives 200 percent to everything he does,” his mother said. If the first implant is successful, he will be a candidate for the second ear implant.

On Friday, as hundreds of students gathered around him,” Otte said he “felt really, really good,” through the school’s interpreter Alex Wilbur. Stephanie Ward, a teacher who oversees Otte’s learning needs, stood watching the show of support with tears in her eyes.

Ward described Otte as a hard-working honor roll student who attends regular classes.

With the surgery, Otte, Ward said, “was not concerned with the pain but how much it was going to cost his Mom,” she said.

Students and teachers in Otte’s Saddleback Community, one of six groupings of classrooms at the school, became aware of Otte’s worry for his mother and decided to help with the hat day fund raiser.

Otte wants to be a lawyer who specializes in adoption when he grows up so he can help other children find loving homes, Ward said. “That’s the kind of caring person he is.”