In the first row of a UCLA medical school lecture hall,
second-year Nghi Lu takes notes attentively. Her eyes shift between
her professor and the slides he projects on the screen.
At either side of Lu sit two women trained as court
stenographers. Before her are two small laptop-sized screens. Typed
words appear rapidly on the screens with the soft clicking of the
stenographs barely audible above the professor’s voice.
But Lu is not listening to the professor’s lecture ““
she can’t hear him.
Lu has had profound hearing loss since the age of two. Rachael
Abbatiello and Melodie Gifford, who accompany Lu to her 8 a.m.
medical school class every day, are real-time captioners from the
Office of Students with Disabilities.
Two real-time captioners are required for Lu’s classes so
they can take turns typing during the four hours and so one can
catch terminology the other may have missed.
“They’ve been with me ever since I started medical
school,” Lu said, “They are my ears for the
class.”
Lu takes notes and understands most of the necessary information
by reading the professor’s lips. But when the lights are
turned off to display the slides, she relies on the words on the
screen which appear almost as soon as they are spoken.
The class takes a 10 minute break.
“Can you hear?” asks Dr. Scott Nelson. “I
don’t have a very loud voice.”
Before class, Lu asked the professor to wear a microphone that
amplifies his voice directly to her cochlear implant, a device that
electrically stimulates the hearing nerve in her cochlear or inner
ear.
Before she received the implant in 1998, Lu relied on an oral
interpreter to help her “hear” the lectures during her
undergraduate classes at the University of Utah. The interpreter
sat in front of her and mouthed the words verbatim after they were
spoken so that Lu could read her lips.
“I had to juggle watching her, watching the board, and
watching the professor,” Lu said.
“Today, looking at the slides, looking at the professor,
and looking at the screen, I try to get as much as I can.
It’s not always 100 percent.”
Lu immigrated from Vietnam with her family when she was two with
the help of a sponsor family in Utah.
Her hearing loss was first discovered when she was in daycare,
but Lu’s family never treated her differently because of
it.
“My family never really thought of my going to a deaf
school,” Lu said. “They had the same expectations of me
as they would any normal kid.”
Lu’s father was shot and killed in Vietnam before she was
born. It was from her mother’s stories that Lu found the
motivation to become a doctor.
“I would have liked to have done something at that
time,” Lu said. “I want to help and decrease
people’s sufferings.”
After coming to medical school, Lu joined the Association for
Medical Professionals with Hearing Losses.
The organization is made up of health care professionals who
suffer from some degree of hearing loss.
AMPHL has provided Lu with a support group of peers who have
found ways to overcome the same challenges she faces.
“Before I came to medical school, I was always worried
about how I was going to hear people’s hearts,” Lu
said.
The organization helped her obtain an electronic stethoscope
which transmits the sound of a beating heart directly to her
cochlear implant.
Lu learned how to lip read at a very young age and has leveled
the communication playing field in her education. But a problem
will arise when Lu begins her third year of medical school when med
students begin rotations in the hospital.
“The captioners can’t come with me to work, and I
need to figure out how to catch all of the communication that is
going on,” Lu said.
“A sign language or oral interpreter is one thing, but
it’s not going to take care of the situation in the surgery
room because they wear masks.”
In order to face this challenge, she plans to take a year off
from med school to learn sign language.
“I grew up in a hearing world, but yet I don’t
belong in the hearing world,” she said.
“I don’t belong in the deaf world either,” she
continued. “I talk; I don’t know sign language.
I’m kind of in between.”
Lu’s classmates admire her ability to handle the rigors of
medical school.
“I think she’s more attentive and pays more
attention than other students in class,” said Murrad
Abbelkarim, a fellow second-year medical student.
Lu’s hearing loss has not been a barrier in the
friendships that she’s made.
“My friends have had to make some accommodations,”
Lu said. “They have to face me when they talk, speak slowly,
and put up with my many requests for repetition.”
Unfortunately, her requests for repetition and rephrasing have
been met with annoyance and frustration at times.
“People get annoyed. But I know that I’m going to
have to keep asking because when it comes to a patient, I need to
know.”
In the future, Lu wonders if she will be able to coordinate the
teamwork necessary to save a patient’s life in an emergency
situation by being aware of her surroundings.
“I don’t want my hearing loss to be the reason why a
patient dies. I don’t want it to be a liability,” she
said.
“I’m always aware of that, and I think the fact that
I’m aware of it makes it less likely to happen.”
Inspired by studying abroad through Semester at Sea, Lu hopes to
work in the field of international medicine and travel the
world.
“There are always going to be people who believe that
people with disabilities shouldn’t come this far,” Lu
said.
“But those are the minority, and those are the people you
shouldn’t pay attention to.”
When it comes to pursuing her dreams, Lu does not see her
hearing loss as a barrier. The fact that she can’t hear has
helped Lu literally put into practice the greatest lesson
she’s learned: “Don’t listen to the people who
put you down.”