What's That Pig Outdoors? (22 page)

Five days later, just as she prepared to enter the hospital, she was informed that she had to wait still another day. She coldly warned the hospital that if that was necessary, they had better prepare a space for her in the psychiatric ward, because she had come to the end of her rope. They found a bed for her right away. Of all things, it was in the obstetrics ward, right in the middle of scores of mothers and newborns—a place hardly appropriate for the emotional health of a woman who has just lost a child. This was 1980, but it seemed that most doctors and hospitals still wore nineteenthcentury horse blinkers so far as their patients' psyches were concerned.

Debby, however, had just begun to plumb her well of resources. She demanded—and got—a bed in another ward. It turned out to be the cancer ward. Fortunately the only bed available there was in a private room, so she did not have to endure the things that go on in such a place. But her real ordeal had not yet begun.

Early in the morning of the sixth day, she was wheeled into a small, windowless room and given drugs to induce labor. The contractions began slowly. I sat at her side, holding her hand and putting cold compresses to her brow at the worst moments. Hours went by, and little happened. Doctors and nurses came and went. They spoke only to her and not to me. Despite her discomfort, she relayed to me what they said. They administered more drugs, which also failed to work. Her pain grew. I sat in a cold sweat, feeling more and more helpless. “What can I do?” I asked a nurse who looked in. She shook her head irritatedly, as if to say, “Nothing.” I cursed my deafness for the barrier it had thrown up between me and those in authority. I feared that if I demanded to be told the details of what was happening to my wife, I would be thrown out of the room.

So, as she gritted her teeth against the agony, I held her and soothed her as best I could as the doctor forcibly delivered the fetus. The memory is like a Hieronymus Bosch rendering of the depths of hell, one that I have managed to block from my consciousness for almost a decade. When it was over we were both exhausted and dripping with sweat. She turned to me—the hospital personnel had yet to offer me a single piece of information— and said that she had to go into the operating room for a dilatation and curettage, the scraping of the womb to remove the remaining contents of conception. At that moment an anesthesiologist entered and said he'd have to inject an anesthetic into the lower spine to allow him to complete the delivery with instruments.

“No!” Debby said, and despite the anesthesiologist's importunings, she would not give in. She had been warned by her neurologist that a caudal anesthetic during or after labor might send her into another seizure and that she should never allow one to be administered. Evidently the anesthesiologist wasn't familiar with that peril, or with her medical history. But against her adamant refusal he could not insist.

The procedure, Debby told me, would take about twenty minutes. Meanwhile, I was to wait outside in the fathers' room. An attendant
wheeled Debby into the operating room and I sat down alone. Twenty minutes passed. Thirty. No one came. Forty-five. An hour. My stomach turned cold. Had something gone wrong? An hour and fifteen minutes. I stared at the doors to the operating-room area, got up, and peered through the glass. I could see nothing, no one. An hour and a half, and still I saw no one. Except for me, the fathers' room was empty. The clock ticked on. “Has Debby died?” I thought. “Why won't anyone come to tell me?”

After almost two hours had passed, a weary resident came into the room and beckoned. Wordlessly he led me to Debby, lying on a gurney just outside the operating room, nodded, and departed. She was white, drawn and exhausted, but alive. “I'm okay,” she said, as tears of relief flooded my cheeks.

Just as Debby had entered the operating theater, a mother delivering twins in the next room had experienced complications, and the obstetrician and his nurses had had to leave Debby alone while they dealt with that time-consuming emergency. Whether no one had thought to inform the deaf man in the fathers' room of the delay, or whether they simply could not spare anyone for the brief moment it would have taken to do so, I don't know.

In the end we both recovered from the ordeal and the mourning, and put them behind us as rapidly as we could. Certainly the humiliation and impotence I felt still stings my memory, but I thank my stars that Debby had the resilience and resourcefulness to compensate for my inability to do the things a hearing husband would have done in the same situation. As in all successful marriages, each spouse's weaknesses are offset by the strengths of the other.

We chose not to sue. The urologist, we felt, was as much a victim of circumstances as we were; the law of averages had simply caught up with him in the same way as the roulette wheel had once again turned up my number. In no manner did we believe he was negligent. As for the HMO and hospital personnel, their worst sin was that of honest ignorance, the benightedness of the time. Besides, no financial settlement could have compensated us for the pain of our loss. To institute a lawsuit, we thought, would just have been to drag out for years the process of healing.

What caused our baby's death? Possibly a genetic flaw. It might have
been exposure to the Coxsackie virus during the early weeks of the pregnancy; both Colin and I had had it at the time. Perhaps the amniocentesis was to blame. We will never know. What is certain is that today the medical profession recognizes the impact of fetal deaths, even those as common as simple miscarriages, on the emotional health of the mother.

Prodded by federal law in some cases, modern medicine is beginning to recognize the right of deaf patients—and of deaf members of patients' families—to instant and complete information in doctors' offices and hospitals. Today every urban hospital worth its Blue Cross contract ought to have at least one lipreading or sign language interpreter on staff. Not only should they make sure that deaf patients understand every word that their doctors tell them: they must keep the lines of communication open between deaf patients and the nursing staff. They also address the needs of deaf members of patients' families, sitting with them in the waiting room during surgery—and helping deaf fathers enjoy the miracle of their children's birth in the delivery room.

Like any other father, I took frequent and happy responsibility for feedings and diaperings and baths and other joys of young parenthood. I do feel guilty, just a little and not very often, when I think of how Debby would awaken in the night to a crying baby and quietly slip from our bed, careful not to disturb my sleep. Alone in the kitchen she'd prepare his bottle and clean his bottom while I slept on.

Early in our marriage she had declared that she would stay home and take care of our children when they were young, while I won the daily bread. She was going to be awake at night and weary during the day, she reasoned. It was silly for two people to suffer if only one had to. (That's just one reason why I love her so.) Her decision long antedated the revolution of two-earner families and day-care centers; in those days, mothers almost invariably took on the primary responsibility of child care. Not for Debby, however, a life of soap operas and lunch with the ladies. Three months after Colin was born she began work on a master's degree in library science at Rosary College, and finished it three years later, just a month before Conan came along.

“What is it like being married to a deaf man?” Debby is sometimes asked. “How is it different from marriage to a hearing person?” Her reply: “How should I know? I've been married only once!”

She does say that being unable to talk with me in the dark is probably the worst problem of communication we have. She's tried tracing words on the skin of my back, but all that does is tickle me. Nonetheless, we've developed a rough code for pillow talk. A quick little circular motion of her finger on my arm means “Did you lock the front door before coming up to bed?” Anything more complicated than that requires turning on the bedside lamp.

And she wishes I would go to the theater with her. She loves the theater, but I miss too much, even sitting in the first row, to truly enjoy a play. She knows how agonizingly antsy sitting for two hours and understanding little can be, so she attends with friends. We do, however, go to the ballet together. Dance is the most visual of the performing arts, and I enjoy it intensely, especially when I can feel the vibrations of the music and match it to the action onstage.

Occasionally I feel that Debby doesn't sympathize enough with my dislike of large parties. In the past she has dragged me to such gatherings despite my having absolutely nothing in common with the people there, simply because she needed an escort and demanded that I do my husbandly duty. On the other hand, she has an exquisite sense of when it is absolutely necessary for me to carry the flag—certain obligatory literary parties are an example—and I cherish that.

In the same way I've sometimes felt that she has regarded my deep latter-day interest in electronic communications devices such as computers and TDDs (successors to the primitive TTYs) as just another expensive hobby. It is not that to me; as I've explained, it's an important way of keeping the walls of isolation from closing in. I have to admit, however, that I've squandered small fortunes on transitory enthusiasms such as photography, tropical aquariums—she still refers to that as “Henry's Fish Period”—and model railroading.

On the other hand, we have so much in common that what we don't or can't share seems exceedingly trivial. We are both writers and readers. We love traveling, especially in the Rocky Mountains. Our value systems
are identical; we judge people not by their wealth and possessions but by their intellects and contributions to society. We see eye to eye on family matters, especially the rearing of our boys.

And how has my deafness affected my relations with them? Again, much more is known today than twenty years ago about the psychological consequences hearing children of the deaf often face. Lou Ann Walker's excellent 1986 book
A Loss for Words
told about the awesome responsibilities she faced as a very small child in helping her deaf mother and father deal with the outside world.

Even as a toddler she had to serve as their ears and voice, dealing with tradesmen, town officials, and lawyers in language she barely understood. She heard hearing people say hurtful, derogatory things about her parents, who spoke in sign language and had very little speech. As a result, she subsumed her identity into theirs; it took many years of adulthood before she was able to function confidently as a hearing person in her own right.

Our pediatrician, who knew something about deaf culture and wrongly assumed that I was a member of it, warned Debby not to force Colin to serve as a go-between for me. “Don't make him handle the telephone for your husband,” he said. “It could give him a complex.” Possibly it could have, but the doctor was needlessly worried. After all, there was a hearing adult in our household. In practice, Debby and I were home at the same time; a phone call for me usually was from the office, and Colin would simply hand the receiver to her. He knew she knew more than he did about such things. When he grew older and more sophisticated, he would occasionally handle a call. They were so infrequent we never felt that any pressure was being put on him. And, we believe, Conan had the same experience.

As for hearing jeers and catcalls from ignorant oafs: Just once, Debby thinks, did Colin have a bit of trouble with that, when he was about twelve. A fellow seventh-grade Y club member informed Colin that he wasn't going to come to our house for a meeting “because your dumb deaf dad talks funny.” Colin, who always has possessed a quick wit and a sharp tongue, immediately retorted, “You're adopted. You don't know who your father is. I know who mine is.” And that was that.

Colin, especially, showed an early awareness that his father could not
hear. When he was barely a year and a half old, not yet speaking more than a few words, we noticed that he always tried to maneuver into my line of sight when he wanted to talk to me. Before he was two, while riding in the kiddie carrier that sat on the rear of my bicycle, he'd thump me on the back so that I would stop and turn around to see what he had to say.

Almost as soon as both boys were high enough to steal a cookie from the jar on the kitchen counter, they probably had the sense that although their daddy might not be able to hear and that he spoke in a funny way, he still knew how to get along in that great big strange world outside our house. Often I'd take them without their mother to places where they could see how I spoke with unfamiliar people, sometimes having to repeat myself but most often effortlessly. And it cannot have been lost on them that the people their mother and father socialized with were almost all ordinary hearing people, with an occasional deaf guest.

More important, perhaps, life in our family was just like that at their friends' houses: quiet, suburban, mostly unhurried, with occasional patches of frenzied activity when the family packed the car and visited Gramma and Grampa or went camping in Canada or the American Rockies. The boys' childhood, I think, has been just as normal and ordinary as mine was, with their father doing for them exactly what hearing fathers do for their children. Their father has always been there, even to attending their school Christmas musicals, events that are to a deaf man about as exciting as a
Playboy
centerfold is to a blind one. They have had the normal amount of space to grow, and if their father's deafness has been a noticeable part of their surroundings, perhaps it stands out no more than any other stick of family furniture.