Southwest Airlines
Spirit
By Nathaniel Reade
Photography by Will Yurman
Dr. Carolyn Stern has a special gift for listening. It makes so much sense when you learn that she’s deaf.
ON A COOL, SUNNY SPRING afternoon, a patient we’ll call Marika checks herself into the urgent-care center at Saint Marys Hospitaly, in Rochester, New York. A college student in her late 20s with blonde hair and big brown eyes, she explains it to a woman at the registration desk that she has been suffering from nausea, diarrhea, heart palpitations, and a general loss of energy. Marika has no idea she is suffering from a disease that, if left untreated, kills about 30,000 people every year, a disease quite easy for doctors to miss. Fortunately for her, she will be seen by a physician unusually good at listening.
Which might seem ironic, because Dr. Carolyn Stern is Deaf.
A petite, smiling woman with wavy, shoulder-length brown hair and stylish black-framed glasses, Stern was born on Long Island, New York, in 1964. Her mother had German measles while pregnant with her, causing Carolyn to be born completely deaf in her right ear and mostly deaf in her left. When this was confirmed at an audiology clinic in Florida, the therapist told her parents,
