Tania Hanna had waited nearly two and a half years to hear what most new mothers hear in nine months: “Mama.”

Clad in a tiny Mississippi State University cheerleader outfit, her daughter, 1 1/2-year-old Meagan Hanna ,heard her first whisp of sound as specialists turned on the device that would power her cochlear implant. As the youngest recipient of such an implant in Mississippi in 2000, the little girl, as a triplet with a brother and sister in 1999, clung to her mother and cried, unsure of the new sound.

The day had marked both the end and beginning of a journey to bring Meagan into a hearing world.

Eighteen months earlier, Tania had given birth to the triplets at 29 weeks gestation. After two months in the hospital, the babies arrived home with one sibling on oxygen and another who had failed a hearing test. All three would require the early intervention services necessary to assist with developmental delays.

Seven months later, Tania received the conclusive diagnosis that her daughter was profoundly deaf.

“They said that she would be able to grow up and have a family. That was all the information they gave me,” Tania said. “I thought that maybe there would be hope in other places. I had no understanding of what it meant to have a deaf child.”

After receiving care from a home teacher, a speech pathologist, and physical and occupational therapists, hearing aides were recommended for her daughter.

“But her hearing loss was in her inner ear, so they were never going to work,” Tania said.

Then, a specialist from Jackson recommended a cochlear implant. At the time, no one Meagan’s age had undergone the surgery in Mississippi, but the Food and Drug Administration had just lowered the legal age of cochlear implants to 18 months. Meagan had just reached the age to qualify.

“They carve out a place in the skull to place a magnet and then track a piece of wire into the cochlea,” Tania explained.

Meagan arrived home with a large bandage on her head and waited one month until her specialists signaled they were ready to turn on her device.

The family relocated to Jackson three days a week so that Meagan could attend special classes at Magnolia Speech School, a prerequisite of receiving the implant.

“At 28 months old, she said, ‘Mama.’ It was such a relief, such a precious moment,” Tania said.

After becoming a single-parent family, strapped with bills, increasing financial struggles and triplets, the Hannas returned full time to Ellisville, where Tania enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Southern Mississippi.

“I was so exhausted,” she said. “I wondered how I was going to do this.”

On a graduate assistant salary, she placed the children in kindergarten.

“Meagan needed explicit and systematic instruction. I applied for scholarships,” she said. “Meagan was very young. All of them were. But the program offered the auditory training she needed. I wanted more for her. I went after it with a passion.”

Through the years, Meagan learned to evolve with her implant upgrades, which are required every six to eight years. Although the implant’s internal components have remained intact, upgrades to the external structure have made wearing her devices easier. Where she once strapped a 3 x 5-inch device to her back, her processor now rests comfortably behind her ear.

She also has learned to separate voices in larger crowds to focus on specific people, although she still struggles sometimes with lower pitches and foreign accents, she said.

In 2008, Tania graduated with her doctorate in curriculum instruction. Seven years later, she accepted a job at MSU-Meridian as an associate clinical professor in the Division of Education.

“That was my passion originally, and Meagan just escalated that,” she said.

In 2022, Meagan would follow, somewhat, in her mother’s footsteps, receiving a bachelor’s degree from MSU in information technology services before joining the MSU staff as an IT specialist a year later.

For the time being, Meagan is focused on her career and her love for reading romance novels, although continuing her education is a possibility, she said.

“I’ll just trust God and see where it goes,” she said.