The sound of silence

That scary day

After a lifetime of being deaf, my best friend just got cochlear implants. When he woke up after the operation, we all stood around him. His wife was the first to say something. He heard her voice and immediately burst into tears. We all spoke in turn, letting him hear our voices and our names, and with every word we said, he became more emotional. When we were done, there was silence in the room. He looked at me and asked what the sound was. It took me a while to understand what I was hearing, and when I understood, I said that he hears silence. He shook his head. "It's not silence," he said slowly, hearing his own voice for the first time. "I have heard silence all my life, but this is different." There was a sound from the hospital room, and he immediately perked up. "Isn't it silence?" We all exchanged glances around the room in awe before I spoke. "No," I said slowly. "It was the sound of someone screaming."