The Deaf Heart, page 8
The scrub nurse counted all of the bloody tools used during the laparotomy. She counted again, and then once more. She then gestured to a circulating nurse to come over, and whispered into her ear. The circulating nurse searched under the surgical table and under all of the smaller tables in the room. She looked at the surgical nurse and shook her head in the negative.
The surgical nurse turned to the head resident, said something, and pointed to a gap in the lineup of instruments on her tray. The resident followed her gaze to the large torso, which looked like an old leather medicine ball. He snapped his head and shouted. The circulating nurse ripped off the surgeon’s stained sterile outfit and replaced it with a fresh set. He snipped off the stitches that he’d joked over and tweezed out the filament. The gloved hands crawled back in. He cocked his head to the side as if bending down to find keys that had dropped below a car seat. Out came a pair of bloody forceps.
Max could see a collective sigh of relief in the room. The resident shot a glance in Max’s direction. Having anticipated this, Max picked up his camera and blew imaginary dust off the lens.
After two and a half hours, Max had still not been called to the table to photograph anything. The doctor certainly didn’t want a pair of rusty red forceps recorded on film for publication or presentation. Still following the rules of the king’s court, Max stood there and waited until he was dismissed. The new line of sutures made Max think of the red ants marching in line across his own naked abdomen.
Dr. Robb had arranged for Max to live temporarily in a trailer home with a senior medical photographer who was heavyset and secretly nicknamed Bimbo by the other members of the department. When they were first introduced, Max held out his hand. Bimbo just nodded slightly and said, “Yeah.” On the first day of his internship, Max followed Bimbo around the lab learning the day-to-day operations—loading film onto developing reels; feeding film through the E-6 color slide processor; operating the darkroom enlargers; pouring chemicals into the Versamat, the black-and-white automatic printer; using the MP4 copy camera on a stand; and keeping thick textbooks open and flat under the camera. Throughout all this, Bimbo never said a word, but Max could tell he was silently enjoying the superiority of having an intern take note of his every move and technique.
After work, Bimbo squeezed into his VW bug and motioned for Max to follow him. Out on the west end of the island where Bimbo lived, Max saw his first trailer up on stilts. The Gulf of Mexico was only fifty yards away down the beach road. Homes there had to be up on stilts by code, or else the frequent storms that came through would flood them.
Inside the trailer, Bimbo disappeared into a back room. Since Max wasn’t given a tour of the place and had no idea where he was supposed to sleep, he set his bags by the sofa in the living room. Bimbo never said anything about dinner, and didn’t come out from the back room. Max stayed where he was, examining the trailer while trying to figure what to do about his appetite, which hadn’t been attended to since breakfast.
The living room opened into a kitchen with food-encrusted pots on the stove. Bags of tortilla chips, corn chips, and potato chips were open, with chips crumbled all over the counter. Everything seemed to be opened, for that matter. Cabinet doors. Utensil drawers. The oven. Even the freezer was partway open, dripping water onto the floor. A curious smell, a mixture of mildew, fried chips, and athlete’s foot, hung in the humidity.
Max decided to go across the coastal highway to the convenience store to get a Pepsi and whatever food struck his fancy. He settled for a microwaved burrito and ate his dinner outside, in front of the store, leaning against the wall and watching tanned half-naked people come and go. Crossing back over the highway, Max went down to the beach and watched body surfers chase light brown waves. The surf didn’t have that crisp white break that the Atlantic had. As soon as the sun set, mosquitoes came out in droves, forcing him to run back to the trailer. Except for an incandescent light coming through the blinds at the rear window, it was dark. He tiptoed up the steps and slipped inside. He felt around for a light switch and found one by the sofa. A lamp with a Donald Duck shade came on. Just about every piece of memorabilia on the walls and end tables revealed an obsession with Disney: Mickey & Minnie Mouse, Pluto, Scrooge McDuck, Tinkerbell, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Dumbo. Max unrolled his sleeping bag as a bed sheet over the sofa. He stripped down to his underwear and lay down on top of the bag. As he was about to turn off the grinning Donald Duck, Bimbo waddled into the living room.
“Hey—I, um … just got back from the beach,” Max said, “watching the body surfers. You surf?”
Bimbo lifted the cover to his stereo turntable and slid on a record. Before Max could say anything more, Bimbo began dancing along the length of the living room and kitchen. All he had on was black nylon shorts. He pranced this way and that, making sharp turns and twists, guiding an imaginary partner through a dance routine—a fat Fred Astaire with doughy flesh jiggling every which way. This went on for twenty minutes or so. Max didn’t know if he was supposed to watch Bimbo or ignore him (to allow him privacy to practice, if that was what he was doing). To be safe, Max sat up and pretended to half watch and enjoy the beat pumping through the hollow flooring and Masonite walls. Then, as suddenly as he’d entered, Bimbo exited, leaving the stereo cover open. The needle automatically lifted off the center of the record and rested itself on the side of the turntable. The spinning stopped.
The next morning, Max awoke early with a burning sensation on his abdomen. In the light from the Donald Duck lamp, he could see a thread of red fire ants marching across his stomach toward the kitchen.
9-29-81
Beach House porch
Hey folks!
Am settling into some semblance of a routine. Here’s a typical day’s schedule:
6-7:30 a.m. – rise and shine; breakfast and watch The Three Stooges (very important for my sanity)
7:30 – leave the house for work (20-min. drive)
8:00-5:00 – work, work, work
5:30-6:30 p.m. – wack, wack, wack (tennis with Zag)
7-8 – dinner (Zag’s a good cook!)
8-midnight – study for written exam
We’ll get our first paychecks soon. I’ll be able to loosen my belt a notch. Work has been going okay. There’s so much I don’t know about this field that some days I feel defeated. Zag has been real supportive. He’s brilliant that way. I just need to read more, study, and review. Think all this has to do with me being an average student growing up in public schools with no interpreters or note takers, not getting full access to information. My processing mechanism is stuck in a primitive mode or something. Haven’t met many people yet, particularly females. It gets frustrating because it makes me really nostalgic for all of the female friends that I had during college. I’ll be fine once I meet a woman to confide in and for companionship. Don’t get me wrong -- I’m not lost and lonely. Just have to be patient with myself sometimes.
Oh -- you asked about the hospital. It’s the largest complex on Galveston Island. Why was it built here of all places? I think it’s because Galveston was Texas’s largest city at one time, so it made sense to build a hospital. It’s grown little by little over time to the point where it’s now a major teaching hospital. On Seawall Boulevard, which runs east and west along the island, are several souvenir shops, fishing piers, bars, and seafood restaurants. We saw a couple of shopping centers in the middle of the island where it’s wider. And out west where we are, it’s mostly mobile homes, beach houses, and cottages. Since summer has been over, there are not many people around. We see some families open up their houses for the weekend, and then by Sunday afternoon, they’re gone. That’s one mistake Zag and I made when we picked our house. We didn’t take into consideration that our community would become a ghost town during the off-season. We’re learning to live with it. Once in a while, a co-worker from the hospital will drive out and stop by for a beer or a meal. It’s comfortable, pleasant, but just a little lonely at times.
I hope Grandmom and Grandpop’s lives have eased up a little in spite of all their medical problems. Keep me updated on their condition.
Took my hearing aids in to the Audiology Department for a tune-up. Folks seem pretty nice there. One woman even knows some signs.
Two more weeks till the written exam … gulp! Dr. Robb is going to give us a mock exam next week. You may not get a letter from me for a while, as we’ll be in a don’t-mess-with-us zone while the big date draws near.
Mucho love,
Your One & Only
Cross-the-Heart
Public Relations Occasionally, you will be asked to photograph a variety of situations outside of the hospital but within the university system. Examples would be taking pictures of building dedications, public relations photos of a particular setting, grip-and-grin ceremonies, graduations, convocations, orientations, etc. In all situations, be sure to wear your white lab coat with identification. Get to the assignment site early to study the situation to ensure a photographic setting. You might have to move a trash bin or a traffic cone out of the way. Check out the background and the time of day the assignment will happen. You want to avoid noontime shoots with the sun directly overhead. This causes deep facial shadows which makes everyone in the picture look like raccoons. When talking with the group to be photographed, be lively. Talk it up. Most people are self-conscious about having their picture taken. Reassure them that they look good, even if they don’t; find ways to make each person look their best for the shot.
Word spread through the hospital that there was a deaf man working in the pathology photography lab who had graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology. It was unheard-of on Galveston Island for a deaf person to get any education beyond a deaf-and-blind high school institution. A hospital representative from the Affirmative Actions office had set up an appointment in the lab to meet this man she’d heard about named Dempsey Maxwell McCall.
When it was time for his appointment, Max stepped out of the darkroom and squinted for a minute to let his pupils adjust to the lighting in the room. Out in the hallway he saw a tall African-American woman dressed in a sharp business suit holding a legal pad.
“Hello, I believe I have an appointment with you?” said Max.
“I’m supposed to meet with a gentleman named Dempsey Maxwell McCall,” said the woman. “My name is Dotty, from Affirmative Actions.”
“Hi, I go by Max. Dempsey Maxwell McCall is my legal name.”
“Oh, my Lord. You speak so well for a deaf person,” she said.
You talk pretty good for a Southerner, he wanted to say. He’d been told many times by hearing people how well he could speak, sometimes even while other deaf people—with unintelligible speech—were standing right next to him.
“I brought this yellow pad thinking that we would be writing back and forth to communicate. Well, I’ll just use this for my interview notes. Is there a quiet place where we can converse?”
“I wasn’t aware you were going to interview me. I already had my entrance interview over at personnel. Is this a follow-up for probation or something?”
“No sir, not at all. This is for The UTmost, our house organ.”
“I’m sorry—your organ what?”
Dotty chuckled.
“UTmost is a newspaper created in-house by the University of Texas. My department would like to interview you and contribute a human interest article for the paper,” she said.
“Why would the university want to interview me? I’ve only been here a month.”
He checked his watch. Lunch break was coming up soon, and a bunch of the photogs were getting together across the street to eat chicken-fried steaks at Ducky’s, a local Galveston joint. He had to finish printing up black-and-white photos of a plastic surgery sequence.
“We are always on the lookout to feature new employees who come from special backgrounds,” said Dotty.
A red flag went up in Max’s mind. “Special”? As in “Spedz”? He remembered the derogatory label from his school days for students in special ed classes. They were usually slow learners, or mildly retarded, or had some physical disability. Thankfully, he’d never been placed in those classes, but he might have been had his parents not fought so hard to keep him in regular classes. “Don’t be a Spedz” was a common refrain among the “regular” kids. Max felt for those in special ed classes, for at times he too had been ridiculed with the name “Spedz.”
“Um, what do you mean by ‘special backgrounds’?” asked Max.
“Oh, for example, someone from another country, or a person with a unique skill like skydiving, or one with a disability.”
“I don’t fit any of those categories,” said Max.
“Don’t you think it would be good for others to know how much you have accomplished as a hearing-impaired person who performs medical photography? You would get your photo in the paper, too.”
She had him there. He began imagining cute medical students and nurses stopping by the lab to ask for him. Besides, doctors and scientists would know more about him, which could help alleviate the awkwardness of working with a deaf person.
“Sure, I’ll be glad to do the interview. But can we schedule it for another time? I have a photo deadline I need to meet by noon,” said Max.
Dotty agreed, and then wanted to know one more thing—if he would be willing to volunteer to teach an informal class on campus in basic sign language to a group of health-care professionals. He accepted, even though he wasn’t trained to teach sign language; it’d be a good opportunity to meet some people.
On his first day of class, there were four women waiting, seated in a semi-circle. One of the women was a grandmotherly type, who had been working in medical records for twenty-five years. Another woman was an X-ray technician with two artificial arms with pairs of clasping hooks for hands. Guess I’ll have to excuse her from the fingerspelling portion of the class, he thought to himself.
The third woman, a big-boned physical therapist over six feet tall, stood up and gave him a firm, pumping handshake. And then there was Annette, brunette and demure, who already knew how to fingerspell her name neatly when introductions were made. She immediately wanted to know how to sign blood and heart, for she worked as a phlebotomist at the blood bank. While Annette was telling Max and the class about her line of work, he was already thinking about which restaurant to take her to, the clothes he would wear on their first date, the home they would live in after they were married, and the number of children they’d have and their names.
Max asked the class why they wanted to learn sign language. The physical therapist said she wanted to be able to communicate with potential hearing-impaired patients. The grandmother said one of her grandkids was deaf. They watch sign language on Sesame Street together, she said, and she wanted to be able to sign as well as that woman on TV who can hear and is very expressive and fluent. Max had to let her know that the woman was Linda Bove, a famous actress who was deaf and a native user of sign language. The X-ray technician began talking and gesticulating but Max couldn’t understand her, of course. Annette helped by fingerspelling for her. “B-o-w-l-i-n-g.”
Max asked if the X-ray technician wanted to learn sign language because of bowling.
Annette fingerspelled further, “H-e-r l-e-a-g-u-e h-a-s d-e-a-f p-e-o-p-l-e.”
He could picture the X-ray technician trying to converse in sign language with her prostheses. He’d seen that before. What he couldn’t see was how she could grab a heavy bowling ball and roll it down a lane. Perhaps she had a friend set the ball on the lane and then gave it a nudge forward with her foot or something.
Annette, who always waited for everyone else to reply first, said that she wanted to be a certified sign language interpreter so that she could interpret for some of the deaf parishioners at her Jehovah’s Witness temple. Immediately Max stopped playing his planning-the-future game. He proceeded with the strict business of teaching the ABCs of ASL.
A month after the interview, Dotty passed on a message to Max from a woman named Evy who taught a beginner’s sign language course in the evenings at Galveston College, the island’s community college. She was inquiring if he’d be willing to substitute for her while she went to Beaumont for a workshop. He agreed to do it in the hopes of forming more connections with women from the island—no longer “island women,” which conjured up images of women in films set in the South Pacific. Evy said that it would be really good if he signed to the class about himself. They would get a good glimpse of Deaf culture that way.
Max never did get a date with any of the women from his classes, though the experience proved to be the necessary link in meeting someone who would forever change his outlook on life.
One early autumn day, he was finishing up a work request to photograph a series of shots of the university’s newly erected lecture hall, a state-of-the-art facility on the outskirts of campus. Max decided to take a break and walked across Market Street to a corner store to buy a soda. There, he saw a Hispanic man behaving in an animated way next to a rusted, beat-up yellow Gran Torino. The man was gesturing to a woman—who turned out to be Evy. As Max walked closer, he could see that they were signing to each other. Max could tell that the man’s use of ASL was that of a native signer. Evy was getting in a sign here and there, but it was clear she didn’t understand in any detail. Her responses were vague, and Max thought the man accepted her less-than-fluent signing because he didn’t have anyone else to communicate with outside what was probably a very small circle of deaf friends.
Max wanted to meet him. He had been on the lookout for others of his kind but hadn’t had any luck for two months. Deaf people were truly part of an invisible culture, and here was a deaf man, who had come out of the woodwork and into broad daylight.
