Links to Life’s Needs Often Faulty for Deaf

This is the second of two articles on the deaf in the San Fernando Valley.

On Feb. 11, a deaf man, dazed by a head injury suffered in a car accident, was taken by ambulance to the emergency room at Antelope Valley Hospital.

The victim, Bert Reins, a sign-language instructor from Canoga Park, said he and the medical staff communicated by exchanging notes.

But Reins later said his written questions were not answered. He said that when he asked such things as where he was and how he was hurt, the staff passed him notes telling him to relax.

Katherine Gribble, a student of Reins’ who stayed with him in the emergency room, said she and her sister asked for an interpreter, but the hospital provided a nurse with only limited knowledge of sign language. Gribble said the nurse stayed for about five minutes.

Reins was released after 1 1/2 hours at the hospital. Two days later his wife took Reins, who said he was still in great pain, to Northridge Hospital Medical Center, where an interpreter was provided almost immediately. There, Reins said, he was able to be more specific about his physical problems.

Physicians at Northridge told him he had sustained a skull fracture and suffered a severe concussion and hemorrhaging. He was admitted to the hospital.

Care Called Correct

A spokesman at Antelope Valley Hospital said the care Reins received was by the book and there was no problem communicating with him. Reins, however, said he suspects his problems were the result of not having access to an interpreter at the hospital.

Every day, deaf people need the police, the fire department or emergency medical care. The deaf, however, say they cannot always count on the same kind of attention a hearing person receives.

Among the problems deaf people face: How do they make a dental appointment? Contest a traffic ticket? Contact an employer who placed a want ad in the paper?

The communication gap continues to handcuff deaf people, even though technology has improved their lives. Today, the deaf can use the telephone, know when the doorbell is ringing or the baby is crying, fully enjoy television and wake up to an alarm clock.

71% Unemployment

Yet the deaf, who suffer a 71% unemployment rate, cannot always afford these devices. And when they try to talk to government agencies and businesses with their telecommunication devices--the deaf’s version of the telephone--they are not always successful. Untrained employees operating the devices on the other end sometimes send back garbled messages or simply hang up.

Outsiders’ ignorance of deaf people also is a burden.

At a recent state hearing on hospital rates, an advocacy group for the disabled had arranged to have an interpreter present. But before the hearing began, a state employee stood up and asked all those who were deaf to raise their hands. No one complied, of course, because they heard nothing. The man, satisfied that there were no deaf people present, told the interpreter to leave.

When the deaf communicate with the hearing world, they still rely chiefly on interpreters. But there is a perennial shortage of interpreters.

“The demand for interpreters is very strong,” said Donald L. Rosenkjar, San Fernando Valley director of the Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness, known as GLAD, which provides the bulk of interpreters for deaf people in the Valley. “We always have a shortage.”

Not All Get Interpreters

At GLAD’s Valley office, 27 to 30 people request interpreters every day. Often some of those people must be turned down, sometimes as many as 10 a day. Overall, GLAD, which has five offices in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, provided interpreters on 30,000 occasions during the past fiscal year, but the need was probably three times that number, said Marcella M. Meyer, executive director.

To handle the demand, the organization places priorities on the requests. Job interviews get the highest priority, which means someone who needs an interpreter for a doctor’s appointment or appearance in traffic court might have to be rescheduled.

Specialized interpreters are even rarer. In Southern California, there are five interpreters certified for court work, and only three of them are active.

Legal interperters are an asset in the courtroom because terms commonly used in trials are sometimes barely distinguishable in American Sign Language, said Debra A. Gaudy, a counselor for the deaf at the state Department of Rehabilitation’s Valley office in Van Nuys.

For instance, the sign for “fight” can be the same as “abuse.” The sign for “hit” could mean “beat.” In court, such distinctions could determine the outcome of a trial.

$12 to $25 an Hour

There is little financial incentive to become an interpreter. Though the pay for a certified interpreter ranges from $12 to $25 an hour, most of the work is part time and top wages are reserved for more complicated interpreting in courts or hospitals.

Where interpreters are most needed is in the hospitals, but until recently there was no systematic way to provide the service.

For the past four years, a nonprofit Orange County organization, the Dayle McIntosh Center, has provided a round-the-clock emergency interpreter service for Orange County hospitals. The service, called Communication Medical Emergency Network for the Deaf, known as COMEND, guarantees that an interpeter will be at a hospital within 40 minutes.

Twenty-eight interpreters have been on hand for medical procedures ranging from births to amputations. One interpreter interceded for a man who could only sign one-handed because the other hand was mangled in an industrial accident. The interpreters also will help deaf parents who take their hearing children into the hospital.

The service was extended to Los Angeles County in December, 1983, but only four hospitals in the Valley contract with COMEND for the services. They are Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, with several locations in the Valley, Serra Memorial Health Center in Sun Valley, Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Valencia and Lake View Medical Center in Lake View Terrace. In Los Angeles and Orange counties, 47 hospitals contract for the service.

Some Prefer Notes

Other hospitals may call on a case-by-case basis, but COMEND prefers contracts to keep the organization financially sound, said Brenda Premo, executive director of the Dayle McIntosh Center. Some hospital administrators are not using the service because they say passing notes is a satisfactory method of communicating with the deaf, which is a mistake, Premo said.

“There is a lot of fear, anxiety and bewilderment going on with the deaf patient,” she said. Someone who is semicomatose or hysterical will not be able to write notes, but they might be able to use sign language, she said.

Also, she said, the deaf who rely almost exclusively on American Sign Language will not necessarily have the written English skills to communicate with medical personnel.

Reins, the father of three deaf children and one hearing child, said he is contemplating suing Antelope Valley Hospital. He said that if he had not gone to Northridge Hospital Medical Center, where COMEND provided an interpreter, “I could have had a stroke or died.”

However, Shirley Sayles, assistant administrator in charge of nursing at Antalope Valley, maintained in a written statement dated more than a month after the incident that a staff nurse, Reins’ 10-year-old son and two sign-language students interpreted for Reins.

Katherine Gribble and her sister, who take Reins’ class at Antelope Valley College, said they saw the accident on the way home from the class. But they had attended only three beginners’ classes, not enough to be of much help at the hospital. “We knew the alphabet, dog and cat and things like that,” Gribble said.

‘He Was Scared’

Furthermore, Reins’ wife, Jo, and her son arrived after Reins had been treated.

“He was scared, really scared,” Gribble said. “There was no one there who could really talk to him.

“When his wife came in, there were tears in his eyes,” she said. “He was relieved.”

Because of his injuries, Reins said, he cannot remember the night and depends on the exchanged notes he took home and what the students told him to recall what happened.

The other primary way deaf people reach the hearing world is through Telecommunications Devices for the Deaf. A TDD resembles a computer keyboard equipped with a small screen.

The TDD transmits written messages over phone lines. A caller types in messages that flash across the screens at both ends. When the caller is ready to listen, he types “GA,” short for “go ahead.” Users say the TDD is as easy to operate as a typewriter.

Many Buy Device

Many businesses and government agencies are buying TDDs and advertising the numbers, but not everyone purchasing the equipment knows how to use it, members of the deaf community say. And, some deaf people assume that businesses with TDDs also have sign-language users available, which is not always true.

Sloppy use of TDDs has been documented by Adele Podolsky, deaf services coordinator at the Darrell McDaniel Independent Living Center, a nonprofit organization in Van Nuys that helps disabled people to become independent.

Podolsky, who is deaf, regularly contacts the police, Fire Department, hospitals and other agencies with her TDD to see if they are answering the calls properly.

She said people using TDDs at the police and fire departments do an excellent job. However, she has had bad luck with employees at some state agencies who occasionally pick up the ringing phone, then hang up. While communicating with the state Department of Social Services, she said, she has had a conversation cut off and has left messages that are never returned.

Little Faith in TDD Users

Meyer, GLAD’s executive director, has so little confidence in the hearing world’s ability to answer TDD calls that she has instructed her children to sue if something happens to her because emergency personnel do not respond to her TDD call.

A man who works in a tiny office overlooking a parking lot in Van Nuys is determined to make the TDD system work for the deaf. Three years ago, Dennis Scan established a business for the deaf called Silent Connections Answering/Relay Message Service.

His 65 clients include an attorney, accountant, physician, landscaper, window washer, a Wilshire-area business operated exclusively by the deaf and lonely elderly women who just want some company.

His answering service is not typical.

For instance, if a person wants to call Barbara Sherman Inglis, a deaf attorney from Santa Monica, the phone number to dial is actually Scan’s. Scan calls the law office with his TDD and, with the attorney and client on separate lines, Scan relays messages back and forth.

When Judith Pachciarz, a deaf physician at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Westwood, is wanted in another part of the hospital, the staff cannot page her over the intercom. Instead, a nurse calls Scan, who uses his TDD to activate the physician’s vibrating beeper. The physician then calls Scan on her TDD and he gives her the message.

‘Hearing Secretary’

Scan, 31, says he considers himself the deaf’s “hearing secretary.”

Contributing to deaf people’s isolation is American Sign Language, which deaf experts say might be the third most used language in the United States after English and Spanish. ASL, a necessary tool for many deaf people, is a hybrid of early American homemade signs and French sign language, which was brought to this country in 1817.

The differences between ASL and English are tremendous. It is impossible to sign in ASL and speak English at the same time because the languages do not correlate. ASL has its own grammar, syntax and structure.

In some respects, ASL is more elastic than English. A signer could say with one gesture that “A cat is sitting under a table.”

But ASL’s brevity sometimes has been mistaken as primitive. For example, ASL’s version of “Look at that big white house” would be “Look house big white.”

Expressive Expressions

While English uses such tools as commas, parentheses, semicolons and periods to herd thoughts into meaningful sentences, a raised eyebrow, a puff of a cheek, a turn of the head or the speed of the hands help convey a message in ASL.

Visiting an interpreter class for master’s degree students at California State University, Northridge, provided some insight into the symbiosis an interpreter and a deaf person must reach to get a message across. It also illustrated some of the ethical and linguistic split-second decisions an interpreter makes every day.

This is one of the hypothetical situations that the teacher, Jan Kanda, presented: A person is interpreting at a food stamp office for a client. A state employee tells the deaf person that he will begin receiving food stamps in six days. The interpreter, having been at the office many times, knows the state employee really means six weeks.

Interrupt, or Not?

Should the interpreter interrupt the conversation and point out the mistake, or remain silent?

The interpreter should keep quiet, Kanda told her class. “We are there as communication equalizers, not fixer-uppers.”

Some in the class seemed incredulous, but Kanda reminded them that a hearing person would not have someone there to point out mistakes.

Kanda also warned the students not to clean up hearing people’s speech because it has led many deaf people to believe hearing people speak perfect English.

A deaf student sitting in the class nodded her approval of the advice, saying, “It makes me feel real inferior.”