I utterly failed to update in November!
I survived my first semester in veterinary school and started my second semester on January 17th.
There were hiccups in getting videos captioned in the first semester and it took them nearly a month to finish them. They were horrible quality and the captioning services they used couldn't understand anatomical terms. Really, they wasted the money getting them captioned. I would've been better off uploading them to a private YouTube channel and using the auto-caption feature. That would've given me better quality than those. I got by, but they weren't adequate enough to be equal access to my peers.
If that wasn't bad enough, they repeated that same mistake for videos for this semester as well. They promised they'd get them captioned during the winter break so they'd be ready for the spring semester. The employee responsible for getting these done took it upon herself to try to wiggle out of doing the work and claimed funding for the captioning was denied. So I went back to the person in charge and she was unaware this person hadn't followed through with her job and approved the captioning services. Although the captioning will be done, they will once again be late and I cannot use them the same time as my peers.
This worries me as to what will happen for third year surgery labs. How will things be handled? How will surgery work for me? Will I be able to gain ASL fluency before then? Will I be using CART for all the surgeries and if so, how will they get it set up?
That would be the bad. The doubts I have about being Deaf and in veterinary school is not the common doubts medical/veterinary students usually have when they ask themselves: "Am I smart enough?" but more so, "Can I still succeed even with these barriers?"
The good is they haven't given me any issues relating to my CART services. That, combined with my upgraded Cochlear Implant and I'm able to float by in school. Recently, we've set up a program through 1Fuzion that allows my CART/Real Time Captions to overlay on the PowerPoint Presentation at school. So while the professor is lecturing, my captions appear on the giant screen in class. This allows me to see what the professor is pointing to while the captions/speaking is occurring without missing it! Professors aren't always specific when they refer to a picture on the screen. For example they may say, "And this molecule right here *points with laser* binds to this receptor over here and then it has an effect of XYZ" and by the time I look up from my captions, there are numerous items on the screen they could have been pointing to. I could ask them to repeat, but then they would never finish a lecture. The 1Fuzion was a solution I proposed and enacted last week and it was entirely by mistake! My CART team told me about it but they didn't realize it would also work on top of powerpoint, they thought it would just go to my own computer! I will still be able to read the captions on my own computer, but it'll be fantastic to be able to watch the powerpoint instead of looking up and down at my own computer screen.
I can't guarantee there won't be classmates who will loathe the new captions at the top of the screen, but you know what? They aren't deaf, they can get over it. They have absolutely no clue how much harder I have to work at everything and I don't have the energy to take their annoyances into account of my education. For the most part, I think most people will either learn to like it, or they'll learn to ignore it. The staff at school is supportive of this change so at least I'm glad I don't need to battle about this.
Until next time, whether that's in one month or six.
