On the farm, which they owned for about a decade, their kids would zipline across the pond in the summers and skate on it in the winters. They rode ATVs and four-wheelers. "Nothing real fancy," as her dad said. Daisy loved to sing, pounding the piano.

When she was in grade school, her parents remember struggling to remove a tick that had burrowed into her scalp and taking her to the doctor. When she was 11 years old, she began having seizures. One doctor thought it was epilepsy. Another thought it was migraines.

At 17, she awoke to her dad shaking her and realized she couldn't hear him. She was diagnosed with Ménière's disease, a rare inner ear disorder.

As her hearing worsened, her brother Milan, who is just 13 months older than she is, encouraged her to get the cochlear implant she'd been weighing. Whenever they'd see friends, she'd keep having to ask "What?" and "Huh?" He told her: "You're missing so much!"

She found a doctor in California, where she now lives, whom she trusted and who was optimistic that the surgery, which involves implanting one piece of the electronic device in her head, would also ease her vertigo.

"I think a lot of it was the stigma, then," her father said. "You're in the deaf community, that whole thing."

His eyes filled with tears. He shook his head, sipped his coffee.

Weeks after getting the surgery, they activated the device. "As soon as she got it hooked up, all that stigma went away. She was just Daisy again."

'Incredible vulnerability'

In a video from that time, in April 2023, Kent sits in a doctor's office.

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