Bloomfield teen uses drive, determination to make dreams come true

BLOOMFIELD, Mo. -- When the Bloomfield High School cheerleaders, in their traditional purple and gold, take to the gym floor to perform one of their crowd-pleasing dance routines, the dance is flawless. The girls move with exact precision, the result of endless hours of rehearsing. The team has won dozens of awards over the years.

Their uniforms are identical from head to toe, and their similar hairstyles are all held in place with gold bows.

One of the cheerleaders is different from her counterparts, though.

Torrie Baker is deaf. When she takes to the floor, she hears almost nothing. And yet she never misses a beat. She performs in perfect sync with the rest of the squad.

When Baker, now a 17-year-old high school junior, was in middle school, she dreamed of being a Bloomfield cheerleader.

"She thought of nothing else," said her mother, Lorrie Duckworth. "She wanted more than anything to be on the cheerleading squad."

After failing to make the team her freshman and sophomore years, Baker was on a mission. She attended every basketball game and recorded every move the cheerleaders made on her cell phone.

"She played those [videos] over and over and over," her mother said, "and then she'd practice the moves just as the girls had done them."

At the start of her junior year, Baker tried out again. She made the squad.

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Accomplishments for Baker have never come as easily as they have for most. She has succeeded with a seldom seen determination and with a lot of perseverance.

Baker was the firstborn in her family of three children. It became evident when she was less than a year old that she was not progressing as her parents expected.

"We had her to doctor after doctor, and finally she was diagnosed with a syndrome called Floppy Muscle Disorder, which meant she did not sit up or crawl as quickly as other babies," her mother said. "She performed about two years behind most children."

Unrelated to the syndrome, doctors also realized Baker had a hearing loss. Her speech had not progressed, and she was not responding appropriately to voice commands. When Baker was 2 years old, it was discovered she had no hearing at all in her right ear and less than 50 percent capacity on the left side.

"We were referred to two specialists in Cape, and Torrie was eventually fitted with a hearing aid for her left ear," Duckworth said.

While the hearing aid didn't bring Torrie's hearing level up to 100 percent, it did make a difference in her daily life. She began attending preschool in the Bloomfield system and working with speech therapist Tara Mouser.

Baker couldn't hear certain letters clearly and it was evident in her speech pattern. Mouser worked with Torrie through her elementary years.

"As I watched Torrie dance with the cheerleaders at the Christmas Tournament, my mind went back to kindergarten when she struggled to even hear sounds," Mouser said. "I shed a few proud tears. Torrie has always been very dear to my heart. I always held her to very high standards because I knew that one day she would be able to do whatever she set her mind to do."

Mouser credits the Duckworths for Baker's perseverance.

"Her mother always told me that 'can't' is not an option until she tries," Mouser said. "She is what she is today because of her will to succeed but also because she had parents who never give up on her."

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When she was 11 years old and in the fifth grade, Jason and Lorrie Duckworth made a decision that would forever change the life of their daughter.

They opted, with Baker's approval, for a cochlear implant.

"It was a major decision," said Jason Duckworth, Baker's stepfather. "If the surgery does not work, the patient is not a candidate for any other surgery. That's one of the reasons that the implants are only performed on profoundly deaf patients where there is no other option."

A cochlear implant is a small, complex electronic device that can help to provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hearing impaired. The implant consists of an external portion that sits behind the ear and a second portion that is surgically placed under the skin. The implant has a microphone, a speech processor, a transmitter and an electrode array, which is a group of electrodes that collects the impulses from the stimulator and sends them to different regions of the auditory nerve.

The surgery was performed at Children's Hospital in St. Louis.

"It really hurt," Baker said of the recovery period. "They actually turned up the volume of the implant a little bit at a time until it was regulated so that it's not such a shock. I just remember everything seemed so loud."

The original implant is will remain under Torrie's scalp for the rest of her life. As improvements are made, the device that is worn around the back of her right ear is updated.

"I remember loving the sound of flip-flops," Baker said. "I had never heard them before. And I loved being able to hear my own voice in my head."

The adjustment to the hearing world was not an automatic or an easy one. Although she could now hear, the sounds were not the ones to which the hearing world is accustomed.

"The sounds Torrie hears are more of a robotic tone," her mother said. "It took awhile to discern between my voice and the voice of her siblings. It's not the sound that we hear when we hear others speak, but she adjusted to it."

The device is a delicate one -- so delicate that Baker cannot take the chance of damaging it during cheerleading. While cheering, Baker has to remove the exterior portion of the implant that takes her back to the deaf world. She relies on her teammates and inner signals to proceed through the drills.

Kim Fox, the Bloomfield cheerleading coach, praised Baker's effort.

"It goes without saying she has to work twice as hard but she has never complains," Fox said. "To watch her face while she cheers says it all."