Video of deaf woman hearing her voice for first time after Houston surgery is Internet sensation

With all the depressing news going around nowadays, it's nice to hear something uplifting. Perhaps that's why this video of a deaf woman listening to her voice for the first time is so moving.

According to her blog, 29-year old Sarah Churman, a self-described Texas "stay-at-home mommy, trophy wife and dog groomer," was born with profound hearing loss and has worn hearing aids since she was two years old. She reads lips to understand what people say but had never heard the sound of her own voice.

After receiving a device that was implanted in her middle ear and picks up sound through her ear canal, she was recently able to hear her voice for the first time — and as her reaction shows, the results are amazing.

Churman received the implant in Houston a couple of months ago at Envoy Medical and returned there last week to have it turned on. The St. Paul, Minn.-based company opened a center in The Woodlands that specializes in the ear implant surgery last year after the Food and Drug Administration approved Envoy’s Esteem hearing technology, "an implantable system that converts mechanical vibrations from the eardrum into electrical signals, boosts and cleans up the signals, and converts the signals back into vibrations it then transmits into the cochlea," Med City News reported. It is the first fully implantable device to treat hearing loss in the United States.

Among the investors in Envoy is Houston Rockets coach Kevin McHale, whose wife, Lynn, is the sister of the company's CEO Patrick Spearman. Watch the FOX 26 video that explains the connection.

McHale's In-Laws No Stranger to Houston: MyFoxHOUSTON.com