DENTON, Texas — When Alana Douglas learned she was going deaf, it didn’t impact her hearing as much as it did her vision.
“You just start to think about things not being accessible,” said Douglas, a junior at Texas Woman’s University in Denton. “I just started to think about that more and how I would want to be cared for.”
Before enrolling into TWU, Douglas planned on being a nurse. But in high school, when doctors told her she’d be deaf by 40, it opened her eyes.
She started to see a disparity in the quality of healthcare deaf patients receive.
“That’s like going to Japan or France and you need a surgery, but all your doctors don’t speak English and so they’re just taking you back for surgery but you have no idea why,” Douglas said. “That’s a scary thing to go into the doctor, just laying there or just having them do a bunch of tests on you but you don’t know why.”
To bridge the gap between doctors and the deaf, Douglas, who’s currently about 30% deaf, now wants to be a nurse, specifically for patients with hearing loss.
That’s not the only way she’s embraced her disability, however.
She’s minoring in child development, which inspired her to lead robotics and coding summer camps at TWU, working as an advocate for children with hearing loss.
“Whether or not she knows it, she’s a role model for each of those kiddos and I absolutely love watching her work with them,” said Chad Smith, coordinator of the Future Classroom Lab at TWU.
Her desire to serve the deaf community has made her a finalist for the national Oticon Award, given to someone who makes a difference in the lives of those with hearing loss.
Oftentimes, Douglas says, people don’t see inequity until it impacts them personally.
She says she didn’t.
But she also believes her story can be an encouragement for others to look around and see all the ways they can help.
“People would be more open to communicating with people who are different than themselves if they had the opportunity to just meet them where they’re at,” Douglas said.
Meet them where they’re at. Advice we all need to hear.
To vote for Douglas and see more about the Oticon awards, click here.
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NOTE: The following video was uploaded in Oct. 2023