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Inspiring: Jo Milne, pictured today, heard a human voice for the first time last year at the age of 39

She has a condition that left her deaf and now is robbing her of her sight. Yesterday, in our first extract from her new book, Jo Milne told of the wonderful moment in 2014 she heard a human voice for the first time at 39. Here, in the final instalment, she recalls how she became a worldwide sensation, how she discovered music — and how she also changed the life of a man who years before had been so cruel to her...

Click. Click. Click. I’m standing in the hallway flicking the light switch on and off. The room is alternately plunged in and out of darkness as the bulb hanging from the ceiling goes black, then lights up, and then goes black again.

On and on I go, like a naughty toddler, amused and fascinated in equal measure. Click. Click. Click. Who knew that light switches had a sound?

Sound. I still can’t get used to the idea. It’s just 24 hours since the doctors switched on my cochlear implants for the first time, ending a lifetime’s deafness, and I’m already finding that my home, which I thought I knew so well, is full of noisy surprises.

It’s not just the light switch in the hall that has startled me. Tap, tap, tap. Footsteps follow me everywhere I go on my laminate floors.

They are, of course, my own.

There’s the constant tick tock of clocks, the clicking of the central heating, the voices of children playing outside and cars rumbling past, a dripping tap.

It takes me ages to work out what the constant buzzing sound in my kitchen is, until I trace it to the fridge. I’d always thought of it as an inanimate object. Who knew it had a heart beating away inside?

I get myself a drink from the kitchen. I pour out the sparkling water and suddenly I hear this fizzing sound all around me.

Fizzzzzzzzz . . . I look behind me, on the floor, above me. Fizzzzzzz . . . And then I look down at my glass, see the bubbles jumping and dancing on top of the water, and my brain pieces it together. So this is what sparkling water sounds like. I laugh out loud, then laugh again at the sound of my own voice.

How ironic! I thought that this house, which I’ve recently bought to be near my family in Gateshead, would be a tranquil retreat. It’s anything but.

The truth is that my world has suddenly been switched on right in front of me. A sense that I thought I’d never have the pleasure of experiencing has in an instant coloured and changed and lit up my world.

That light switch, simple though it is, seems to me to represent what’s happened to me: my world going in an instant from darkness to light.

This is the new me. This is Joanne Milne, hearing person. The label of deafness that defined me all those years has gone, banished for ever. I never want this feeling to go away.

Imagined: As a child, Jo used to push her head right up against speakers, convinced that the faint beat she could hear was music

Today is a very special day. Just 36 hours after the surgeons told me, ‘You can hear’, I will hear music for the first time.

Two of my closest friends, Tremayne and Angela, have contacted Lauren Laverne’s 6Music radio show and told her my story. And they have compiled a playlist for me of 39 songs — one for every year I couldn’t hear — and I’m going to listen to four songs, live on air, in front of the entire nation.

We drive to Tremayne’s home, where the broadcast will take place in a few minutes’ time. He makes us drinks as I sit in the living room. The fridge door opening. Milk being poured into a cup. The kettle boiling. And finally footsteps as he comes back into the room with cups of tea.

It’s only then that he notices the tears rolling down my cheeks. Because it’s right now, in this moment, that I realise I’m not only less deaf any more, I’m less blind too.

The same genetic condition that’s left me deaf from birth has steadily been destroying my sight since my early 20s, reducing me to a narrow tunnel of vision. But now, from another room, I’d been able to create a picture in my mind of what Tremayne was doing when he was gone.

It feels incredible. The surgeons have given me back not just one sense, but two.

Seconds later, we’re live on air.

Imagine hearing something so powerful, a sensation so overwhelming, that every little nerve inside you tingles and comes alive. Each tiny hair stands on end as the sound enters your ears before diving headfirst into your bloodstream and swimming around in your veins.

Emotion swells in your heart and deep inside your stomach until finally your brain gives way to this flooding of the senses and, before you know it, you’re lost, swimming in sound, weightless, floating, moving with it.

This is me now as I sit in my friends’ living room listening to music for the first time. It is nothing like I had imagined.

I remember how as a child I used to push my head right up against the speakers in our sitting room, convinced that the faint beat I could hear was music. That this was what made people dance, and smile, and sing. It turns out I knew nothing.

Falling in love: Jo reacts as she hears for the first time when her cochlear implants are successfully turned on

Music is not something that you hear, it’s something that you feel. And right now, I’m falling in love with it for the first time.

My heart is dipping and darting with its beat, my whole body wants to move along with the rhythm and my feet want to tap. This is what music sounds like.

As I’m taken along on this crest of a wave, I forget that people across the country are coming along for the ride with me. That they are listening along to the first four songs I’ll ever hear.

The first one is Laura by a group called Bat for Lashes. As the first notes ring out, my skin starts to tingle.

‘What’s that?’ I whisper to Tremayne. ‘Piano,’ he replies. And as I start to listen to the gentle song, my heart lifting along with each crescendo, I can’t stop the tears.

Companion: Jo, pictured with her guide dog Matt, suffers from Usher syndrome which robbed her of her hearing and most of her eyesight

The next song is Elbow’s One Day Like This and, as the violins start, the tears are streaming down my face again and my hands are shaking.

And on it continues. The tinny beat of The Joy Formidable’s Whirring. The funky sound of Deee-Lite’s Groove Is In The Heart.

Suddenly it all makes sense. Why Mum talks about meeting Dad whenever she hears Elvis. Because that’s what music does. It transports you to a different time and place. Perhaps it’s the closest thing we’ll ever have to a time machine — in our hearts at least.

Tremayne uploads on to YouTube the video Mum made of me hearing for the first time on, so that people who’ve been moved by my music memories on the radio can see a little more of my journey.

That afternoon, exhausted from the emotion of it all, my brain entirely overwhelmed, I go home and take my implants out to sit in silence. Peace and quiet greet me like old friends.

The next morning it’s a new and totally unexpected noise that greets me as I plug in my implants. There is shouting from outside and I can hear the buzz buzz buzz of my phone vibrating. I have dozens of missed calls.

I go to the window, pull back the curtains and gasp at the scene below. Through my tunnel vision I can make out people on my drive: strangers, reporters, men with cameras. And among them all a familiar face: Mum.

Then I head downstairs and open the front door as Mum dashes in. ‘What’s happening?’ I ask her.

‘It’s your video,’ she says, breathlessly. ‘The whole world has seen it overnight.’

It turns out that the film Tremayne uploaded has gone viral. Nearly two million people have watched it. It’s featuring on news websites all over the world, and there have been reporters camped outside since first thing.

‘You’re famous, Joanne.’ Mum’s joking, but as I look at the crowd on my drive, I realise she might be right.

I spend the morning doing one interview after another while Mum makes tea for the reporters. People want to know all about me and my story; there is talk of books, of films, even.

For me, though, newly woken from sleep, it feels like I am still dreaming. I haven’t even got used to the hearing world myself; it hasn’t even been two full days since my implants were switched on. I haven’t had time to think how I feel or how to describe my favourite sounds.

Family: Jo (pictured as a baby with her parents and sister Julie) said she regrets not having a child

After the last reporter leaves my house, there are two more visitors, but these are ones who fill my heart with joy. It’s my older sister Julie with her four-year-old daughter, Casey, skipping beside her.

I open the door and hear my big sister say hello to me for the first time in my life. The emotion spills out of me as I stand on my doorstep and Julie folds me in a huge hug, just like she has done so many times before. But this time I hear her say: ‘Are you OK?’

Casey, meanwhile, skips around the kitchen, oblivious to all the intense emotion that’s going on around her. She starts to draw, her crayons rattling in a box, these little sounds all colouring in the world my niece lives in, the everyday things that I haven’t been a part of before.

And then Casey is in front of me, tapping my knee in the way she’s been told to get my attention. ‘Auntie Joanne,’ she says. ‘Where are the biscuits?’

Such a simple question, but surely the most beautiful thing I’ll ever hear: the voice of my four-year-old niece. My heart has never felt so full of happiness.

So much has changed for me in the past 12 months — a year of extraordinary firsts. A few weeks ago, I went to a school reunion, where I bumped into a man I didn’t recognise. ‘I wanted to say sorry,’ he said, shuffling awkwardly and twisting his glass around in his hands.

‘What for?’ I smiled at him, confused.

And then he told me: he was one of the kids who’d spat on me on the school bus when I was a little girl, who’d called me names that I couldn’t hear, who’d made animal noises behind my back.

‘Do you remember?’ he asked, and even though my heart was still stinging with the memories of those cruel taunts and the way I’d have to clean the saliva off my jacket when I got home from school, I heard such genuine remorse in his voice that I hadn’t the heart to make things worse.

‘No,’ I fibbed, shaking my head. ‘We were just kids. I don’t remember.’

But he told me how the memories of what he’d said and done to me had followed him round his entire life — and how he was determined that his own kids wouldn’t do the same when they came across a disabled child.

‘It’s made me a better husband, a better father,’ he said, guilt stinging his eyes so much that I wanted to do anything to stop him from feeling bad.

Proud: Jo Milne is pictured here showing the digital processors around her ear that allow her to hear 

All I could do was smile and say that it was a million years ago. That little deaf girl was gone, and she was replaced by a hearing woman, one who was proud to have Usher syndrome and who was determined to go out and make a change in our world, however small, to celebrate our differences rather than punish one another for them.

It was a defining moment for me — a time where life had come full circle. Yes, I’d suffered as a result of people like him, but he’d suffered too and he’d learned from it. That was my gift back to him.

One of my great regrets is my decision many years ago not to have a child of my own. I’d always been worried about having children in case I passed my condition onto them; I didn’t want them to suffer like me.

Had I known 20 years ago about things like genetic testing and donor eggs, I might be writing this now with one of my own children sitting beside me. Being deaf and blind doesn’t mean you can’t have children, you might just need a little extra help.

There have been so many wonderful moments over the past year since I had my implants fitted, yet there are still sounds that make me jump — a car horn when I’m walking down the street and even that loud crunch when I eat a packet of crisps!

And while it has been such a wonderful gift to be able to hear, it has also introduced me to a world that isn’t as pleasant as I’d thought it was as a deaf woman and, in some ways, I’ve become a little afraid of it for the first time.

Now when I walk down the street, it isn’t that quiet serene place that I’d assumed. Sometimes I can be amazed at how angry the world is: the impatient drivers who beep their horns, people swearing or spitting nasty comments at others who get in their way.

Being deaf, I’d been blissfully unaware of the bad side of sound; after all, I’d never even heard half the names that kids called me at school. Perhaps that had been a blessing.

But now, while I get used to embracing all the wonderful sounds around me, I also have to learn to block out the bad ones, all the hate and anger, that I hear now.

Poignant: Jo Milne (right) recalls the first time she heard her sister, Julie (left), say hello for the first time

I suppose, just like when I was a child, I have to refocus on the good and positive things in life.

I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers in the past year: they have sent me tickets for classical concerts, lists of music they think I might listen to, tickets for Wembley where I heard God Save the Queen for the first time, standing among the 50,000-strong crowd, tears rolling down my face as I was swept up in the patriotism.

I’ve even had a letter addressed simply to: ‘The Lady in Newcastle that got to hear after 40 years!’ Incredibly, it found its way to me.

I have so much to look forward to. While I still have some peripheral vision I want to travel the world, to try new skills. With the wonderful gift of hearing combined, I plan to learn how to play the piano.

An incredible blessing has been bestowed on me, and I will never take it for granted. Each morning I reach for my implants and turn on a world that is filled with both good and bad.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Extracted from Breaking The Silence by Jo Milne, published by Coronet on February 26 at £16.99. © Jo Milne 2015. To pre-order a copy for £15.29, visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Offer until February 26, p&p is free for a limited time only.

Jo wishes to make a difference to the 45,000 deaf children in the UK by raising £45,000 for The Hearing Fund and their partnership charity Music and the Deaf. To donate £1 to the campaign, please text MATD25£1 to 70070 #£1perdeafchild