As would later be diagnosed by British doctors, Reddin had Goldenhaar syndrome, Klippel-feil syndrome, and growth hormone deficiency, which left him with a number of conditions including curvature of the spine and facial abnormalities. Through the NHS he had a number of surgical procedures, including the attaching of a prosthetic ear and the closing of an ear canal. And later, as a teenager living in Huddersfield (thankfully reunited with the rest of his family after a four-year wait), he had growth hormone treatment.
“My passion for medicine stems from my life experiences,” he says. “It was this upbringing that inspired me to pursue the subject so that I could also provide medical treatment to disadvantaged populations.”
Whether it was learning English within a year of arriving in the UK and acting as his father’s translator, or thriving at mathematics because he treated it as 'puzzle', Reddin excelled at school and clearly had the talent to progress into higher education. And this he did, enrolling at the University’s Peninsula Medical School having taken a gap year to save up some money.
Reddin received a £2,000 scholarship in his first year, which made a useful contribution to his living costs, and in 2018, he was successful in applying for the Urgent and Emergency Care intercalation course, which enables students to spend an extra year developing their skills in a hospital. And he was able to finance this extra year of study thanks to a Roland Levinsky Intercalating Bursary of £10,000, which has covered his travel costs from the family home to Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield, as well as his monthly return trips to Plymouth for tutorials.
“I’m in the hospital 3-4 times a week, working in different sections across emergency care and shadowing the doctors,” he says. “I deal with a lot of patients, and have also spent time in paediatrics, which was obviously somewhere I had experience of from a different perspective.”
