One student is beating the odds and shattering prejudices by becoming the first deaf-blind medical doctor in the United Kingdom. She is using Tik Tok to raise awareness about her disease and the hardships she confronts. Alexandra Adams comes from South Wales.
Her collection of videos is an effort to dispel common misconceptions about what it’s like to be a deaf-blind medical student. It’s “not easy,” but she hopes that by doing this, she can help educate people about the difficulties — but also the wonderful, inventive world of handicaps and uniqueness, as she remarked in one video.
National Center on Deaf-Blindness defines deaf-blindness as “combined hearing and vision loss, thus limiting access to both auditory and visual information..” However, as Adams points out, it doesn’t indicate that the individual with the illness is completely deaf or blind. In point of fact, she pointed out, deafness may be classified along a spectrum.
In a different TikTok video that has received more than 68,000 views, the 28-year-old man added, “I am profoundly deaf, meaning that, without my hearing aids, I am in total silence.”“But with them in, I’m able to make out the general consensus of a face-to-face conversation using a mixture of sound vibrations, vowel sounds and common sense.” She told Ark Media that after a 17-month hospital stay due to deteriorating health issues, people started doubting her capacity to be a medical student, which prompted her to start the explanatory series. Other than being deaf-blind, she has been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (a connective tissue ailment), mast cell activation syndrome (a condition in which the body’s mast cells produce too much of a chemical that causes allergy symptoms), postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (which affects blood flow), and several respiratory problems.
Adams was barely 2 years old when she got her first set of hearing aids, and she learned to talk and pronounce words by experiencing sound vibrations via a balloon that was put close to her ears.
“This means that, yes, I do speak to my patients face-to-face without requiring an interpreter,” she said in a video.
Her stethoscope is used in the same manner as “any other doctor,” but she adds her own special touch to it. Her hearing aides are Bluetooth-enabled, so she can listen to the lungs and heartbeat of a patient without having to use wires. “We don’t actually need all the hearing to be a good doctor,” she said in a clip. “We can work out a lot about a patient through other clues, such as body language.”
Several people have expressed their admiration for her dedication to the field of medicine in the show’s comments section. “I would love for you to be my doctor, as a disabled patient I feel like you’d get it, and not put unrealistic expectations on me!” wrote one user.
“I am a medical student and I stammer really bad,” posted another, adding that they have a “hard time communicating with patients” and “I love ur courage and u really encourage me.” One of the reasons why deaf individuals are excellent listeners is because they have to focus harder on the person they’re conversing with to comprehend, she added in another video. “Instead, it’s the ignorance and discrimination that is a far greater form of deafness than any hearing disability.”
