The Three Words That Helped Create the UK’s First Deafblind Doctor

At 16, Alexandra Adams was lying in a hospital bed when one doctor did something the others had not. She stepped past what Alexandra calls the invisible line at the end of the bed and asked, "Are you okay?" That brief exchange became the starting point for a journey that would lead Alexandra, who has been deafblind since birth, to become Britain’s first deafblind doctor.

For Alexandra, the question landed in a moment when almost everything else in her life had been shaken. She had gone into hospital for an operation to fix a large hernia while she was a Team GB swimmer training for the 2012 Paralympics. The athletic body she knew and the swimming career she saw as her identity were no longer secure.

She has said that many of the doctors around her barely looked at her, speaking among themselves about treatment plans before moving on to the next patient. The doctor who stopped to ask how she was did not do that. Alexandra answered honestly. She said no, and burst into tears.

What happened next stayed with her. Instead of leaving, the doctor closed the curtains around the bed, lifted her own top and showed Alexandra a long scar across her abdomen. Alexandra recalled the doctor saying, "I know how you feel."

It was not a grand speech or a dramatic intervention. It was recognition. For Alexandra, that mattered enough to change the direction of her life.

From watching the ward to wanting the job

The hospital stay that followed was far longer than expected. What should have been an overnight admission turned into more than a year in hospital, along with a string of further surgeries.

Confined to bed and with time to watch the ward around her, Alexandra began studying the people caring for her. She has said she started to understand what good bedside manner looked like and what made a good doctor. She also came away feeling that the empathy she was developing through her own experience might one day help somebody else.

She did not leave that idea in the hospital. After being discharged, she arranged work experience on the same surgical ward and was supposed to watch the doctor who had inspired her operate.

Instead, Alexandra ended up back on the list as a patient. She has described the twist bluntly: she got appendicitis.

Even that did not put her off. If anything, the years she spent as a patient appeared to sharpen the reason she wanted to go into medicine in the first place. The technical side mattered, but so did the part she had noticed from the bed: whether a doctor actually saw the person in front of them.

A career many people thought was unrealistic

Alexandra has been deaf and blind since birth. She has said she has just under 5 percent central vision in her left eye and none in her right. She can make out colour and shape, but in low light she cannot see anything. Her hearing loss is severe to profound sensorineural deafness, and she has worn hearing aids in both ears since she was two. Without them, she says, she cannot hear anything.

She has also made clear that being deafblind is simply the life she has always known. She has said that because she has lived with it all her life, she does not know any different, and can still run down the road.

After leaving hospital, Alexandra studied for her A-levels at a residential school for blind and partially sighted students near her home in Kent. She has described that period as the first time she met other people like herself. It marked a shift in confidence too. She has said she went from being very shy and very dependent on her parents to becoming head girl.

Her ambitions kept growing. She flew alone to Tanzania to work in a hospital. At the same time, she also ran into what she saw as a culture of low expectations. Staff at school assumed disabled pupils were not capable, she has said, and students were not pushed towards college or university.

When Alexandra said she wanted to become a doctor, teachers tried gently to steer her away from the idea. She responded by teaching herself and buying her own textbooks. She eventually earned a medical degree from the University of Cardiff.

She started medical school in Cardiff in 2015. Reaching the end took the best part of a decade, but the fact that it took longer is inseparable from the health battles she was dealing with along the way.

How she made medicine work for her

Qualifying did not mean pretending her disability did not exist. It meant working out how to practise medicine with tools adapted to the way she experiences the world.

Alexandra uses a white cane in everyday life and relies heavily on her phone. She has described using accessibility apps that help with both vision and hearing loss, including screen magnification. Her phone can also turn handwritten material into digital text and read it aloud through her hearing aids.

Some of the equipment she uses is highly specific. She has an ophthalmoscope that clips onto the back of her iPhone so that the image of the back of a patient’s eye appears on her phone screen. Her stethoscope is a Bluetooth model linked to her hearing aids, something she discovered when she travelled to America to meet other blind and deaf doctors.

She has said that the Bluetooth device actually works better for her than a standard stethoscope and can pick up subtle murmurs more effectively.

Still, one of the things that surprises people is how little specialist kit she says she needs. Alexandra has pointed out that a lot of medicine does not depend on eyesight in the way people imagine. Students, nurses and phlebotomists are taught to feel for veins rather than simply look for them. According to Alexandra, the best veins are found by touch.

She has said her sense of touch, feel and smell is heightened, and that those abilities matter in clinical work. That is also part of the message she now shares beyond hospitals, speaking in schools, at NHS conferences and, on one occasion, at Wembley Arena in front of 16,000 people.

The comment on the Underground she never forgot

One encounter on the Underground stayed with her for a different reason. Alexandra was travelling home from her studies when she heard a boy, about eight or nine, announce to the whole carriage that he wanted to be a doctor.

Then his mother replied with a question Alexandra says she has never forgotten: "But Tim, how will you hear all the poorly people?"

Alexandra noticed that the boy was wearing hearing aids. She has said that she usually would not speak up in a moment like that, but this time she did. Pointing to her own hearing aids, she told him he could be anything he wanted and called them his superpower.

That change in how she talks about disability has come through her own journey. She has said that when she was younger she wanted to blend in and felt embarrassed, but no longer sees it that way. Her deafness, she says, makes her an even better listener.

That idea carries extra weight because of what medical school demanded of her. Alexandra has been in and out of hospital for years, adapting to new life changing diagnoses and multiple admissions to intensive care. She spent 17 months with Covid and suffered multiple pulmonary embolisms, aspiration pneumonia and sepsis. She is now on oxygen.

She has said those experiences cannot be separated from the length of her journey because they were a huge part of the struggle to get there.

The story that began with a teenager in a hospital bed ends with a doctor who knows exactly what it feels like to be overlooked, and exactly how powerful it can be when somebody chooses not to look away.