'I'm the UK's first deafblind doctor - my disability makes me a better medic'

It was three little words that changed Alexandra Adams life. Lying in a hospital bed at 16, recovering from a hernia operation, Alexandra had lost the athletic body and the swimming career she thought were her whole identity. Then a doctor did something none of the others had. She crossed what Alexandra calls the invisible line at the end of the bed, and said: "Are you okay?" Nobody had asked her that in a very long time. Alexandra, now 32, told the Mirror: "A lot of the time these doctors wouldn't really make eye contact with me. They would mumble amongst themselves about the plan of action, and then just move on to the next bed.” The simple question set her on the road to becoming Britain’s first deafblind doctor. Alexandra says: "I said, you know what, no I'm not. And I burst into tears.” Rather than move on, the doctor drew the curtains around the bed, lifted her own top and revealed a long scar across her abdomen. Alexandra remembers: "She said, I know how you feel.” After leaving hospital Alexandra arranged work experience on the same surgical ward and was due to watch the doctor operate. She says: "But, long story short, I ended up on her theatre list as a patient, because I very inconveniently got appendicitis.” Alexandra has been deaf and blind since birth. She explains: “I have just under 5% central vision, in my left eye, none in my right. I can see colour and shape. In low light, I can't see anything. But because I've been deafblind all my life, I don't know any different. I can still run down the road. “With my hearing, I have something called severe to profound sensorineural deafness, and I have worn hearing aids in both ears since the age of two. When I take them out I can't hear anything, which is sometimes quite nice, because I can just switch off when I want to.” Alexandra had arrived on that ward as a Team GB swimmer, training for the 2012 Paralympics, when an operation to fix a large hernia went wrong. What should have been an overnight stay became more than a year in hospital and a run of further surgeries. Alexandra says: "I was developing a lot of empathy from what I was going through, empathy that I might be able to use in the future to help other people.” Bedbound and with little else to do, she started to watch the ward like a student. She says: "I began to observe what good bedside manner meant and how to be a good doctor.” When she left hospital, she did her A-levels at a residential school for blind and partially sighted students near her home in Kent. Alexandra says: "It was the first time I met other people similar to me. I went from being very shy and very dependent on my parents to being head girl." She flew alone to Tanzania to work in a hospital. She also ran into a wall of low expectations, with staff who assumed disabled pupils were not capable. Alexandra says: "We weren't encouraged to work hard. We weren't encouraged to apply to college or university.” When she said she wanted to be a doctor, her teachers tried gently to talk her out of it, so she taught herself. Alexandra says: "I bought my own textbooks.” She then achieved a medical degree from the University of Cardiff. Once qualified, the tools of the job had to work differently for her. She says: “I use a white cane to get about day to day, and I rely on my phone, which has a lot of apps that help me day to day with my vision and hearing loss, like screen magnification. My phone can convert handwritten material to digital text and then speak it aloud to me through my hearing aids too. "I have an ophthalmoscope which I can clip onto the back of my iPhone, so the image of the back of a patient's eye comes up on my phone screen, which is really cool.” Her stethoscope is a Bluetooth model that connects to her hearing aids, a device she only discovered when she travelled to America to meet other blind and deaf doctors. The Bluetooth version, she said, does the job better than the standard kind. Alexandra said: "It picks up subtle murmurs better than your average stethoscope.” Beyond that, she said, people are often surprised by how little specialist kit she actually needs. Alexandra said: "People assume I probably use really techy equipment, but I really don't. It doesn't come down to vision and really knowing your clinical stuff. Med students, nurses, phlebotomists, they're all taught to close their eyes and look away.” The best veins, she said, are found by touch and not by sight. She continues: "You'll get to know what feels good and what doesn't. I have a heightened sense of touch, feel and smell as well." It is the kind of message she now carries into schools, NHS conferences and, on one occasion, a talk at Wembley Arena in front of 16,000 people Once, on the Underground, coming home from her studies, when a boy of eight or nine announced to the whole carriage that he wanted to be a doctor. Then she heard his mother say something she will never forget. The mother said: “But Tim, how will you hear all the poorly people?” Alexandra noticed the boy was wearing hearing aids, and did something she says she never normally does. She said, pointing to her own hearing aids: "You can be anything you want to be, this is your superpower. When I was a kid I wanted to blend in. I was embarrassed, but now I think, so what. My deafness makes me an even better listener." Alexandra started medical school in Cardiff in 2015, and it took her the best part of a decade to reach the end. She has been in and out of hospital for years, adapting to new life-changing diagnoses and navigating multiple admissions to the Intensive Care Unit, including a 17-month stay with Covid, suffering multiple pulmonary embolisms, aspiration pneumonia and sepsis. She is now, as a result, on oxygen. But doesn’t let it hold her back. She says: "You can't not factor in the things that made that journey longer because they were a huge part of the struggle to get there." When her results finally came through, the whole house, the dog included, erupted. Alexandra says: "My parents are over the moon for me. Even when I speak to them after work, none of us can believe it." Through all of it, they had never left her side. Her mother sat with her in hospital every day she has been admitted, and both have driven six hours to reach her on her worst weeks. Alexandra said. "If anything, they deserve the gown and the hat and the degree, because I wouldn't have done it without them." This summer, she finally started work - at a hospital in Dorset. Word of her story has spread locally, and two or three people a day stop her. One morning the driver of the bus taking her to work pulled over, left a full deck of passengers waiting and got off to speak to her. "Am I right in thinking you were on the telly," the driver said. And one of her first shifts a patient asked her something, and out of pure habit she said she would go and find the doctor. Alexandra says: "And then I paused. I said, sorry, hang on, no, that’s me. I’m the doctor now." *See settingsights.co.uk for more information about Alexandra