I thought I'd create a thread with some stories about how some Deaf people became successful with becoming a professional in a career. If any of you have a story of any Deaf Professionals whether it is a doctor, nurse, dentist, pilot, etc then please feel free to post it in here 
Here is a story about a Deaf man who became a doctor.
http://www.amphl.org/articles/arndorfer2001.html
Here is a story about a Deaf man who became a doctor.
http://www.amphl.org/articles/arndorfer2001.html
The supercharged stethoscope hanging from his neck and the high-tech heartbeat detector in his bag give Dr. Mike McKee an air of the physician of the future.
But the instruments really are just tools to help McKee, who is deaf, be the old-fashioned kind of doctor he wants to be.
"I really have compassion for patients, and enthusiasm for medicine," said the cheery 25-year-old, who officially becomes Dr. McKee this morning during commencement ceremonies for the University of Florida's College of Medicine.
"With deaf patients, a big problem is communication," he said. "Since I have a disability myself, I see that as a talent that allows me to understand people with disabilities better and helps me reach out to them."
For McKee, the four demanding years of medical school presented special challenges. They began even before he became the first deaf person to be admitted into UF's College of Medicine.
"I started thinking about medicine at the end of my junior year," said McKee, who has a genetic condition that caused him to be born profoundly deaf, but who communicates easily by lip-reading and signing. "But I wondered, can I do it? Can I be a good doctor being deaf?"
Others wondered the same thing, even some members of the medical school faculty.
"There was some discouragement," he said. "Some people asked why I would even think about it, that I would only have a big letdown later if I didn't make it."
Dr. Siegfried Schmidt initially was a skeptic. McKee worked with Schmidt for six weeks at the West Oaks Family Health Center, a Gainesville training site for UF medical students.
"My first reaction when he came to work with us was this can't be - no way," said Schmidt, clinical assistant professor in the Department of Community Health and Family Medicine at West Oaks. "But as you got to know him, Mike came across as someone with a special sense for patient needs. How he communicated with patients just blew my mind. Patients often opened up to him in a way I have not seen."
Signs of determination
McKee, who earned his undergraduate degree from Lynn University in Boca Raton, where he grew up, said he appreciated the reality check from the skeptics. But he listened to his heart, and today he will walk across the silent stage of the Center for the Performing Arts to accept his doctor of medicine degree.
Along with his family, in the audience will be Lani Crosby, a professional interpreter for the deaf who helped serve as McKee's ears during his final two years in med school.
"I would never have been able to do it without her help," McKee said. "I'd have been shortchanged in the amount of information I was able to get."
When McKee took the surgery rotation of clinical training, Crosby was in the operating room with him. With everyone wearing a mask, he couldn't read lips and depended on her signing to keep him up on what was going on.
Crosby went on rounds with him. McKee can converse easily with one or two people, but when several students and a doctor were talking, often at once, it was difficult for him to follow along reading lips. Crosby was there to sign for him.
When he worked one-on-one with patients, she was with them in the examining room.
"I'm hoping (today) they'll give me a degree," Crosby said with a laugh.
"She should," McKee said. "She got a very good education."
During McKee's third year, Crosby alternated working with him with two other interpreters, Debbie Weinhert and Hank Reidelberger. Crosby was his primary interpreter during his fourth year, being on call whenever needed and, in her off-hours, studying medical terminology critical to her client's education.
"I have medical books by my bed," said Crosby, 33, a mother of two young daughters.
As a freelance interpreter in private practice, she works with deaf people from preschool to medical school, in doctors' offices and in the courts. She also teaches signing to children and adults at Santa Fe Community College.
The UF medical school picks up the cost of interpreter services for students who need them.
Just in the past year, Crosby worked with McKee for more than 2,000 hours. When he worked 110 hours one week during his pediatrics rotation, Crosby was there much of the time.
"We're like brother and sister at this point," she said.
Beating the odds
McKee, whose speech is easily understood, said patients have always accepted him immediately.
"I can't think of one patient who was hesitant with me," he said.
Crosby said McKee was being characteristically modest.
"You don't know how many times I was pulled aside and the patient said, 'He's going to make the best doctor,' " she said.
Unlike the last two years of medical school, which are spent working with patients, the first two are mostly in the classroom. McKee usually had no interpreter then, so he always explained his situation to the professors and asked them to help him read their lips by facing the class.
They usually complied, he said, although sometimes they'd forget and speak while turned around and writing on the blackboard. Occasionally, they'd walk up the stairs of the lecture hall, causing him to crane his neck to try and see them talk.
The first year, he said, he felt he had to prove himself to his professors, classmates and himself. "I had to get over the fear that maybe I was not able to do the job," McKee said.
That notion changed in his second year.
"I felt like I had something special to offer," he said. "Yes, I'm deaf, but by being deaf I can focus on certain aspects of medicine where others might not be able to do as well."
That often was demonstrated in the clinic.
"When I was doing my pediatrics rotation, there was this little boy who had had all his extremities amputated, a result of a medical condition that led to blockage of blood," he said.
"It was sort of like I had a special bond with him because of the hardships I knew he was going to experience because of his disability."
Once, while he was finishing up a suture job in the emergency room at Shands at AGH, a doctor grabbed him and took him to a deaf patient who couldn't read lips but understood sign language.
"The doctor had me get the patient's history by sign language," McKee said. "It was really gratifying because it put it all together."
Dr. Robert Hatch, who was on the medical school's admissions committee when McKee's application came in, said he was impressed from the first interview with him.
"He said, 'I really want to make a difference with (the hearing impaired) population,' " said Hatch, associate professor of community health and family medicine. "I think he's going to have a very important impact on the care of people with hearing disabilities.
"Mike's deafness has increased his compassion, I think, and made him more sensitive than people who haven't had to struggle with something like that," Hatch said.
The right decision
Early on, McKee learned that the technology was available to help him be a doctor. It includes a stethoscope equipped with a hearing aid and an amplifier that pumps up sounds to decibels loud enough to hear respiratory functions.
Also, there's a "graphic auscultation system," the size of a portable phone, that allows heartbeats to be seen instead of heard.
But it was certain people who really motivated him.
As part of his training, McKee worked in a special clinic in Rochester, N.Y., where a third of the patients were deaf.
Working with a deaf physician, Dr. Carolyn Stern, and Dr. Timothy Malia, who hears but is versed in signing, he realized he'd made the right decision.
"They were inspirational," said McKee, who is on the board of the American Medical Professionals with Hearing Loss, a year-old education and outreach organization.
In June, he heads to a hospital in Columbia, S.C., to begin a three-year residency. Beyond that, he's looking at going into family medicine and eventually working with people with disabilities.
"I see myself in two roles," Dr. McKee said, "being a physician, and educating other physicians and maybe helping them better understand people with disabilities."
