THANK YOU, from the disability community, for doing the actual research and not just relying on your first assumptions and stereotypes.
Organization of nurses with disabilities:Ā http://nond.org/
Association of medical professionals who are deaf or hard of hearing:Ā https://amphl.org/
When I was growing up, I was around people who were mostly pretty good at staying positive about my range of career options as a deaf person and who encouraged me to dream big. But one of the few things I was told that I likely couldnāt do would be to be a doctor. This is because they werenāt sure how to work around theĀ āneedā to listen to certain things through a stethoscope. No, it didnāt have a real impact on my career-related decision making because I didnāt really have an interest in the medical professions anyway, my interests took me in other directions. But it was one of the few limits that some people put on my vision, and even though it didnāt have a practical impact on me I still felt the constraint a bit ā just the idea that something random like a stethoscope could potentially shut me out from an entire field.
Now flash forward to when Iām in my 20s, back when I was interviewing people and writing articles for a university staff/faculty publication and alumni outreach magazine. And one day I find myself interviewing a deaf EMT for an article I was writing on deaf women working in various professions related to the various sciences. And this deaf EMT had a specialized stethoscope designed to be SO LOUD that even I, a severely to profoundly deaf person, could actually hear a beating heart or the sound of nerves working! And that was with putting the buds for the stethoscope directly into my ears, which meant that I actually took out my hearing aidsĀ in order to listen instead of having to figure out how to get headphones to directly funnel sound into the eeny tiny microphone in my hearing aid. Ā The kind of headphones designed with buds going directly into the ear just DO NOT WORK FOR THAT, period full stop. And most things designed for hearing people DO NOT WORK for deaf people because they only use the little bitty baby amplification that hearing people use to protect their incredibly fragile ears that start to hurt at just about the point Iām starting to be able to hear that there even IS a sound to be heard. Hearing people run in terror from the kind of BIG LOUD amplification that us deaf people need. (Unless they are the kind of rock music fans who think all good music ends with actual, noticeable hearing loss at the end of the concert.) And on top of that, most things designed for hearing people naturally donāt compensate for the fact that I hear low pitch sounds MUCH better than high pitch sounds. Meaning, I can actually hear low pitch sounds if they are amplified loud enough, but for high pitch sounds ā well, the first 32 years of my life they basically didnāt exist in my life, for the past 14 or 15 years the only reason I can hear high pitch sounds is because these days, with the advent of digital (not just analog) hearing aids, itās now possible to have hearing aids that take high pitch sounds and process them so they sound like low pitch sounds. So this is what water sounds like! When itās processed so that itās actually something I can hear. Ā But somehow this stethoscopeāinvented when (most? or all?) of us deaf folks were still wearing analog hearing aidsāmanaged to be loud enough for me.
Until the deaf woman EMT loaned me her stethoscope for a minute and explained it to me, I didnāt even know that you could actually hear the nerves working, not just the heart or breath in the lungs! And never imagined actually hearing it myself
And the deaf EMT told me that, for deaf people who really canāt hear anything at all even with that LOUD stethoscope, there are other machines to pick up basically the same information that you can get through a stethoscope. And she also pointed out thatās a fairly small part of being a doctor or EMT, anyway. You donāt have to be able to use a stethoscope to join the medical professions.
And ā¦ somehow, even though I had never personally actually wantedĀ to be a doctor anyway, and still donāt want to, and still donāt miss having tried it, it was still so awesome realizing that this one last barrier that had been put on my old childhood imagination could just fade away.
That people with disabilities can do all kinds of things
THAT people with disabilities ARE ALREADY DOING all kinds of things.
Because ā¦ on one hand, yes, there are a FEW things that people with certain disabilities actually canāt do. They do not yet have driverless cars on the open market for everyone to buy, so until thatās ready, blind people still canāt do jobs that by definition have to involve driving (like taxi cab driver, bus or truck driver, etc). And deaf people canāt be phone operators. And although deaf people could translate between written languages, and although there are certified deaf interpreters who translate between signed languages (yeah thatās an actual thing), people who are really deaf (and not just a little hard of hearing) canāt interpret between spoken languages on the phone.Ā
But most of the things that people THINK are impossible for people with disabilities to do? Ā Can be worked around with the right technologies, devices, software, adaptations, and a little resourcefulness and creativity.Ā
More people need to be like @scriptmedic, meaning they need to do the work to actually research the options and find out what is already being done. And they need to talk with people who have the actual disability to see what ideas they have. Because we often have a lot of these ideas, and we often see some of our supposedly more āinnovativeā ideas as being actually rather boring and ordinary because weāve been doing them since before our memories even start. Just by example ā As far as I can tell, from the bits I know (Iāve only known a few adults without hands at all well), many babies born without arms seem to just naturally do all kinds of things with their feet instead, because thatās what they have to explore the world with. It seems like a āgee whizā creative answer for people who havenāt needed to adapt to life without arms, but isnāt so innovative from the perspective of an adult who has been doing all kinds of stuff with their feet literally since infancy. As a deaf person who has been using writing as a tool of communication since, like, age 7 or something, it baffles me when I still occasionally meet hearing adults who seem to find the idea remarkable. And all that is before you even get to the stuff where we have to actually workĀ to come up with a solution, by drawing upon more sophisticated adult experience, knowledge of available technologies, and opportunity to talk with other adults with similar disabilities who are working to solve things too. We usually have a lot, a lotĀ of practice working to come up with solutions for things we havenāt tried before, so we are often likely to see solutions that everyone else missesāand not just for disability related accommodations.
People with disabilities donāt want to set themselves up to fail any more than anyone else. So if they seem to believe thereās a way for them to do it, you should give them a chance to show you, or explain what theyāve already been doing in the past, or explain what theyāve seen other people with the same disability do, or explain what ideas they have that they would like a chance to try out. Donāt just assume and then stop trying. Talk to us.
titsay
vaporwave
amandla
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
