Seeing Burgon: Blind, deaf teen lives her life to the fullest

Burgon's hands are her eyes. During a recent visit to the LDS Church museum, she ran her hands and fingers over every inch of a large sculpture of a pioneer family pulling a handcart. During visits to a dinosaur museum and a high-end art exhibit, Burgon and Bruce were told to ignore the "Absolutely No Touching" signs — she could touch anything she wanted, which she was only too glad to do.

"That's how she sculpts," says Bruce. "She feels the dimensions and shapes, then it goes in the memory bank and she can reproduce it."

Among her many other interests, Burgon developed a deep love of books as a young child when her parents and maternal grandmother spent long hours reading to her. On a recent Monday, Katie brought home six Braille books from the library and by Thursday Burgon was finished with them.

All that childhood reading produced a side benefit: For lack of a better way to describe it, she doesn't talk like a typical deaf person. During those long reading sessions, she heard the words pronounced correctly over and over and was able to imitate them.

Now she reads with her fingers at about the same speed as most people do with their eyes — books, church magazines, Seventeen magazine. (She complains that the Braille version doesn't include coupons.) It's a remarkable thing to watch, as she runs her right index finger over the words, trailed by the left index finger as backup.

Burgon, who was named after her grandmother's maiden name, is hopeful that she will regain much of her hearing. In January, she underwent cochlear implant surgery in her left ear. Surgeons cut into the side of her head and implanted enough hardware to open a Radio Shack — a microphone, a speech processor, a transmitter and receiver, an electrode array and even a magnet. But it takes a year or more for the brain to remap and learn to interpret sounds. She is just starting to make sense of what she is hearing. The sound of her own flip-flops or birds in the yard have caused her to stop and ask her mom, "What was that?" Recently, she has been able to hear the songs of the Beatles, her favorite group.

Burgon utilizes other technology that enriches her life — a Braille typewriter; a PAC Mate, a small computer that, among other things, converts her Braille input into a readable format for her teachers; a special laptop that displays information from the Internet in Braille and provides oral directions and descriptions to help her navigate the Internet; a VictorStream, an iPod type device that allows her to download books. She also listens to movies specially made for the blind that describe what is happening on screen, in addition to the dialogue.

The machines are her connections to the outside world. Otherwise, she is isolated in many ways. She is popular enough that her peers voted her to the Peer Leadership Team, but she walks through the crowded hallways alone and does little socializing. Her closest friends are blind kids who attend other schools.