Time Warner Cable News’ Kristen Shaughnessy files the third installment of a four-part Healthy Living series on a new medical procedure being tested on a young child who is deaf.

2-year-old Nikos Matsukatov was born profoundly deaf with no hearing nerves. Hearing aids and even cochlear implants have not worked. He is now part of a clinical trial at NYU Langone Medical Center for auditory brain stem implant, or ABI - a procedure that is currently only approved for older patients. It has been a long road for his parents Olga and Georgy

"He has nobody but you, and you have to go and you have to deal with it every single day," says Georgy Matsukatov, Nickos's father.

"For a few months you deal with the question why and why is it your child? And then you somehow deal with the anger and frustration. Then you pull yourself together," says Olga Matsukatov, Nickos's mother.

The ABI surgery was done in June. Then in July, doctors did a sedated activation to make sure there were no unforeseen side effects, because there are many nerves in that neurologically congested space.

"Facial nerve stimulation, dizziness, throat tightening, pain in your leg; you know, this is the center of all of your body so you've got 12 cranial nerves, and we're trying to get to a certain area to stimulate that so he has just an auditory response," explains Dr. William Shapiro, Audiology Supervisor at the NYU Cochlear Implant Center.

Now the question is will Nikos hear anything? And if he does, how long will it take for him to even recognize a sound - something at almost 3-years-old, he's never done.

We were at NYU Langone Medical Center to record the first time Dr. Shapiro activated Nikos's ABI. A team of audiologists keeps him busy with toys so that if and when he hears something, he will look up to find the beeping.  

Everyone was waiting for any indication from Nikos that he is hearing something. What was happening is similar to a hearing test. Dr. Shapiro was stimulating different electrodes to see if Nikos responds to any of them.

“There are 21 electrodes on the paddle and our goal is to try to stimulate as many of them as we can,” he says.

Dr. Shapiro says it is not so much about the number of electrodes Nikos responds to, but how robustly they might work. In the final part of our series, find out how the first day of live activation went.