After losing her hearing and rebuilding it through surgery, a single mother of 11 from Phoenix crossed the graduation stage with a message of hope and perseverance.
PHOENIX — Heather Porter, a single mother of 11, crossed the graduation stage at Grand Canyon University, celebrating a milestone shaped by years of setbacks and determination.
“I questioned the whole time… there’s been lots of tears throughout this program,” Porter said.
The Arizona mother earned her master’s degree while raising a large family and navigating profound hearing loss that required multiple surgeries.
It started during her undergraduate studies, when she first sensed something was wrong.
“I was, like, really struggling to understand things that other people were easily understanding,” Porter said.
Doctors diagnosed her with an autoimmune inner ear condition and warned she could lose all her hearing within months. The diagnosis came during the height of the COVID‑19 pandemic, when masks made communication even harder.
“It was very isolating and scary,” Porter said. “I had an identity crisis. I feel like I started withdrawing from a lot of my social groups, even my family.”
She eventually secured funding from an organization that donated the cost of a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted electronic device that sends sound signals directly to the brain. But after about a year and a half, the device began malfunctioning.
“It started acting up, like really bad. It was causing some pains and things, and we found out it was failing,” she said.
She said doctors discovered the implant had been leaking electricity into her head, causing physical symptoms that intensified after a car accident. She underwent surgery to remove and replace the device and continued her education. After completing online classes, she pushed herself to return to in‑person learning.
“I was walking up to that shaking. I couldn’t think straight, I like, felt like I was going to have a panic attack, and it ended up being fine,” she said.
Through every setback, she leaned on her children.
“My kids… they give me, like, so much purpose, so much reason to live,” she said.
Porter’s family is a blend of biological and adopted children. She and her then‑husband originally planned to foster one young child, but when they learned the toddler had three older siblings in another placement, they brought all four into their home. She later gave birth to six children. During graduate school, she adopted another child.
“Everything that I do is for God, and then my kids,” she said.
As her hearing declined, Porter found support in the Deaf community, which embraced her and her children and helped them learn new ways to communicate.
Today, Porter uses her new implant successfully, though she still relies on interpreters in noisy environments and during classes. She said knowing sign language—something she learned years earlier while studying interpreting—has been “a huge blessing” throughout her hearing loss journey.
Her faith, she said, carried her through the darkest moments.
“We can all overcome the challenges that life puts in front of us, and not only overcome them, but become better because of them,” she said.
Now that she has her degree, Porter hopes her children—and anyone watching her journey—see what perseverance can look like.
“There is hope, no matter how low life feels and how hopeless it seems right now,” she said.
Porter plans to work as a psychotherapist, focusing on clients who are deaf or hard of hearing. She has also applied to Ph.D. programs and hopes to pursue international teaching and humanitarian work in communities that often feel overlooked.
