Born to Deaf parents and fluent in American Sign Language, she was heavily featured in the 2000 documentary Sound and Fury, which highlighted the controversy surrounding cochlear implants.
While at first she believed that it wouldn't help her speech much due to her age,[2] after seeing her children's experience with them, years later Nita went on to also become a cochlear implant user.
[3] Heather's hearing grandparents strongly supported letting her get the implant, with her grandmother helping her practice her speech throughout the film.
[6] When her family returned to New York, she decided to ask for a cochlear implant again, since most people in the area did not know how to sign unlike where she lived in Maryland, and she had learned about her father being denied a promotion because of his deafness.
She received her first cochlear implant in September 2002 when she was nine years old,[7] and began intensive speech therapy afterwards, making significant progress and soon switching to a mainstream school where she was the only deaf student.