Born with a rare genet­ic muta­tion called Ush­er Syn­drome type III &mdash ;a dis­ease more preva­lent in those of Jew­ish descent than in any oth­er nation­al­i­ty — Rebec­ca Alexan­der has been simul­ta­ne­ous­ly los­ing both her sight and hear­ing since she was a child, and was told that she would like­ly be com­plete­ly blind and deaf by age 30. Then, at 18, a fall from a win­dow left her ath­let­ic body com­plete­ly shattered.

None of us know what we would do in the face of such dev­as­ta­tion. What Rebec­ca did was rise to every chal­lenge she faced. She was los­ing her vision and hear­ing and her body was bro­ken, but she refused to lose her dri­ve, her zest for life and – maybe most impor­tant­ly – her sense of humor. Now, at 35, with only a sliv­er of sight and sig­nif­i­cant­ly dete­ri­o­rat­ed hear­ing, she is a psy­chother­a­pist with two mas­ters’ degrees from Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, and an ath­lete who teach­es spin class­es and reg­u­lar­ly com­petes in extreme endurance races. She greets every day as if it were a gift, with bound­less ener­gy, innate curios­i­ty, and a strength of spir­it that have led her to places we can’t imagine.