Photos by Ralph Freso / Slideshow / Livestream
Heather Porter started to think something was wrong when she was studying for her bachelor’s degree, homeschooling eight of her 11 children and working as a dog watcher to earn a little extra income.
She was driving one day with a friend and noticed she couldn’t quite hear her.
Porter brushed it off, attributing it to the chatter of the radio and noise of being on the road.
But as the days passed, she noticed she couldn’t hear her children when they tried to catch her attention.
Voices started to fade and sounded muffled.
“I was struggling to understand things that other people understood easily,” she said of watching other people’s lips as they talked to discern what they were saying.
When the Mesa, Arizona, single mom visited an ear, nose and throat doctor, she would find out why.
She was losing her hearing, and doctors didn’t know exactly what was causing it. They suspected it was something genetic or an inner ear autoimmune disease.
“It just kind of progressed rapidly,” said Porter on Wednesday afternoon before her commencement ceremony at Grand Canyon University – one of seven this week for online and cohort students – where she was conferred her master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling with a focus on trauma.
When she started to lose her hearing, the world had fallen deep into the pandemic – a time that felt even darker for Porter, who felt separate from the world and the people she loved.
“There was definitely lots of grieving that happened. Yes, and probably the symptoms of depression,” she said. “I was never expecting to get that diagnosis.
“But I was withdrawing from people, and I was isolating myself. I was terrified to go out and interact.”
Porter went through a few years of struggles to try to restore her hearing, then her world brightened, thanks to a cochlear implant whose cost was covered by an organization that secured the funding for it.
The surgically implanted electronic device bypasses damaged parts of the inner ear to stimulate the auditory nerve. Unlike hearing aids, which Porter tried before the implant, cochlear implants convert sounds into electrical signals rather than just amplify them.
But it hasn't been a smooth journey. The first device started causing her pain, and she had to undergo another surgery to remove and replace it.
“It definitely helps a lot,” she said, though the sounds aren’t as natural as they were before she lost her hearing, and if there’s extra noise or people are too far away, she can’t hear as well.
It also helped that Porter knew American Sign Language before her hearing loss.
She had always wanted to learn ASL, so around the time she adopted her children, she went to school to learn the language.
“Her losing her hearing and to already have the gift of knowing that language and loving that language and having so much connection already in the deaf community (was a blessing)," said her sister, Annie Pearce.
Porter watches lips closely and gets help from captioning and interpreters when she needs them, like at her commencement ceremony.
And she has relied even more on her faith and her family.
“She has had an army,” said Pearce of her supporters.
When she was just 25 years old, Porter was working in the K-12 school system with children who had difficult family situations. She also volunteered for Child Crisis in Mesa.
She and her partner at the time had gone through a series of miscarriages, so they started to look into foster care and got their first placement, a 14-month-old who had three older siblings.
“I was young, 25, and very naïve and idealistic and didn’t want to split up a family, so I got all of them.”
There's no more important work than my raising souls in a loving environment to know God, especially if I can help someone who is in a less fortunate situation.
Heather Porter, GCU master's graduate in clinical mental health counseling
That was the only foster placement because the couple adopted all of four of the children, including the oldest sibling, who had cerebral palsy.
Six biological children would follow, and two years ago, as Porter was in the midst of her studies for her master’s degree, she adopted another child through a kinship placement.
“There’s no more important work than my raising souls in a loving environment to know God, especially if I can help someone who is in a less fortunate situation.”
“It doesn’t matter to me what I do in the world, but if I fail my kids … " Porter said, tears filling her eyes.
Nine of her children watched her, in all her regalia, make her way across the stage in Global Credit Union Arena and receive her master’s degree.
She chose to study clinical mental health counseling with an emphasis on trauma, she said, because as an adoptive mom and someone who has been a part of the foster care system, “that just opened my eyes to some needs in different communities – and then I just found myself as a single mom with 10 kids and went through some of my own counseling journey … having benefited from counselors in general over the years, both for my kids and for myself, I thought I would go that route.”
Porter has worked as a clinical mental health counseling intern at Thrive Counseling Services in Gilbert, Arizona, and after graduation, plans to work as a psychotherapist at Thrive.
One of her specialties will be counseling clients who are deaf or hard of hearing, drawing on her own experience with hearing loss.
Pearce, who was with her sister on her big day, said of Porter, “Everything she does is for God. That is her joy of everything, her reason for everything – and her children. It’s just an honor and a privilege to watch her and be inspired by her. … She feels called to do this, and nothing will stop her, because she feels like God has called her for this.”
Manager of Internal Communications Lana Sweeten-Shults can be reached at [email protected] or at 602-639-7901.
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Related content from commencement:
GCU News: Grad’s accident prompts change to help others
GCU News: Online graduate dedicates achievement to late family members
