 Our next speaker is Maria Virgilio. She resides originally from Bennington, Vermont. Any Vermont folks in the house? Woo, I'm not. But I'm Canadian, so there's some overlap there. She is a PhD student in cellular and molecular biology. Please welcome Maria with her speech titled, Hear Me Out. Maria. I want you all to think about a time that you had to go to the doctors, or maybe even the emergency room, because you thought that there was something wrong with you. But you saw the doctor, and you explained to them what was wrong, and of course you expect them to listen to you and try and figure out what's wrong. But what if that didn't happen? What if no one listened to you when you went there? That's what happened to my sister. Well, let me back up a little bit. So I'm not a doctor, but as the only scientist in the family, I am the doctor of the family. Hmm? Ha-ha. Right? I get all those phone calls like, hey, I have this really weird rash, or I saw this like lump that I have, and I looked it up on WebMD, and they said it was cancer. I'm pretty sure I have cancer. And of course I get to roll my eyes, because they can't see me. And I have to listen to all of their symptoms and then tell them, no, you don't have cancer. That isn't until one day it actually was. You see, one of my patients in my family is my big sister, Anna. Growing up, I looked up to her. There was absolutely nothing that she couldn't do. She was beautiful, and she was smart, and she was so funny. She was also an amazing athlete. On the weekends, I used to attend all of her races, and I only remember a single race that she lost. I remember because of the anguish on her face that I saw when she finished the race. You see, she told me that at some point during the race, she looked down and she noticed that there was a nail stuck in her tire, and she just kept hoping that that nail was gonna stay in place and not move. But at some point, it popped out and her tire completely deflated. But that didn't stop her. She pushed her heart out, even though her tire was wobbling and her room was scraping the pavement, and she still managed to place in second. So you could imagine what she was like without a nail in her tire, right? She was a role model in absolutely every way. I almost didn't even notice that she was in a wheelchair. My sister was born with a form of spina bifida called myeloma ninja seal, meaning that she was born with a hole in her spine that paralyzed her from the waist down. A few years ago, I got one of those phone calls from my sister. She told me that she was really tired and that she was bleeding a lot, and that she had been every day for weeks. So as much as I love doctoring my family, this sounded much more serious to me. So I asked her, well, Anna, have you been to the doctors? And she said, yes, I went there, and they said that there was nothing wrong with me. They said it was just due to complications from being in my wheelchair. But this sounded much more serious to me. So I said, well, I want you to go back and see the doctor again. But she pushed back and said, no, they're just gonna tell me it's from sitting in my chair. But I could tell that she was really scared and I could tell that she was shaking. So I said, Anna, how about if I go with you and we can do this together? To my surprise, she actually agreed. I pushed her into the hospital and went up to the nurses station. I pleaded with them to please see my sister. I said, she's lost a lot of blood and she's really tired. They found her a bed and they said a doctor would be in to see her shortly and they were right. In fact, multiple doctors came in to see her and they listened to her with great care. After a little while, the doctors eventually left us alone and she looked at me with shock on her face. So I said, Anna, what's the matter? She said, well, that's never happened to me before but I was confused what had never happened before. She said, no one has listened to me yet. I've been to three different hospitals and this is the first time that they've actually listened to me. In fact, I started to think that I was going crazy for thinking something could be wrong with me. Even though my sister needed their help, all the doctors could see was that she had a disability. They couldn't see that she was in pain and she was hurting, that she worked hard and that she loved her family, that she was someone who worried about staying well enough to take care of her two daughters at home. So what made the difference? Was it just me being there with her? Three days later, my sister was diagnosed with late state cervical cancer. We knew that the road to a cure was going to be very difficult and we knew it would be most likely unsuccessful. There are more than three million U.S. adults in the United States that require a wheelchair for mobility and despite the Americans with Disability Act of 1990, they are still frequently denied services, receive less preventative care and experienced longer wait times just to see their doctors as my sister did. But it's not all the doctors fault. 20% of Americans have some sort of physical or mental disability and yet fewer than 20% of medical schools actually teach their students how to talk to patients about their needs, disabled patients about their needs. So maybe Anna's doctors were miseducated about her and their biases against her, but I was miseducated too. I didn't know how hard she tried to take care of herself and I didn't trust her. I didn't know what she was up against. You see, there are two main ways of looking at disability. The first is a much more medical point of view which says that the problem lies with a disability and we have to try and fix which wrong with a disabled person. The much more social point of view does not deny that the disability exists but instead says the problem is actually how we as a society decide to deal with the disability itself. For example, this is the 2016 Paralympic Team from Great Britain and just like any athlete, they take their sport seriously and they train tirelessly and yet their events come as an afterthought and are barely televised. So just like any athlete, perhaps we should not see them as Paralympians but as just Olympians. This is Senator Tammy Duckworth from Illinois. She was Lieutenant Colonel in Iraq where she lost both of her legs. She later became the first US Senator to give birth while in office in 2018. The Senate rules actually had to be changed in order to allow her to bring her baby onto the Senate floor to vote but changing those rules wasn't without its problems. Many senators said, well why can't you just vote from the cloakroom instead? Completely overlooking the fact that the cloakroom isn't even handicap accessible. Maybe someday it won't be so difficult for a handicap senator in order to vote. In case you're wondering, four years later my sister is thankfully still alive and cancer-free but she might not have been. I know that differences can be uncomfortable and there are many reasons to dismiss those with disability. In fact, my sister still struggles to get her doctors to take her seriously. Even after an official cancer diagnosis, her gynecologist refused to even believe that she actually even had cancer. We all want to be hurt. The things that we say, they may not always be life or death but that doesn't mean that they're not worth being hurt. So when you leave here today, what I would like you to do is when somebody speaks to you, listen, truly listen when they speak. Create spaces that can accommodate everyone, not just those who are easy to accommodate. And as I've learned from my sister, when you truly see someone and hear them, it changes you and it changes them. So when you see someone in a wheelchair without their legs, you should see a hero and a U.S. senator. And when you see someone who looks and competes differently, you should just see an Olympian. And when I see a woman in a wheelchair who struggles to get to her doctor's appointments, I should see a beautiful caring mom and maybe even a big sister. Thank you.