Doctor Who Overcomes Deafness

When Judith Pachciarz developed a 106-degree fever at age 2, her mother called a doctor, but he refused to believe that the child’s temperature was that high.

As June Pachciarz recalls that 1944 incident, the doctor thought that she had unknowingly raised the thermometer reading by holding it under hot water.

When the obstetrician visited the Pachciarz home in Danville, Ill., he kept his distance to avoid exposure to any disease that might endanger his pregnant patients. He stood in the driveway and looked at Judith while she sat on her mother’s lap on a back porch. When he saw a rash on her chest, he diagnosed measles, June Pachciarz said.

A short time later Judith Pachciarz went deaf and her illness was diagnosed as encephalomeningitis.

Despite that introduction to medicine, Judith Pachciarz said that as long as she can remember, all she ever wanted to be was a doctor.

“It’s the only thing she ever mentioned wanting to do,” said June Pachciarz, a Danville elementary school teacher, now 65.

Judy Pachciarz, in her small office at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in West Los Angeles, said she fought 17 years to enter medical school, earning a Ph.D. in microbiology to assure admissions committees of her ability.

She won that battle, graduating from the University of Louisville School of Medicine in 1983, and is starting her third year of a pathology residence at the VA.

Now 43, she says she is one of approximately 10 deaf physicians in the United States and the first deaf woman in America to obtain an MD and a Ph.D.

A runner who completed the 1978 New York Marathon and a veteran fast-pitch softball pitcher who still plays once a week, she is also medical director of the World Games for the Deaf July 10-20 in Los Angeles. She will supervise a staff of approximately 200, including 40 hearing physicians, who will care for about 2,100 athletes and officials from 32 nations.

Among the staff’s duties will be testing to ensure that athletes do not use drugs to improve performances.

She also volunteers at a Venice clinic, and her duties require that she spread herself “molecule thin.”

Her residency requires more than eight hours a day, and she spends much of it in a lab wearing goggles and surgical gloves examining specimens.

Pachciarz, wearing a red polo shirt, white pants and sandals on a recent morning, cut into a specimen to determine whether it was free of tumors and delved into skin biopsies and put them in solution.

Hears No Speech

After an hour, she walked down a brightly lighted hall to her office and talked about being refused admission to medical schools because doctors feared she couldn’t communicate with patients or use a stethoscope.

“Well, people often make assumptions about what a handicapped person can or cannot do,” said Pachciarz, who hears no speech.

She answers the telephone by coupling the receiver to a small machine where she read questions on a screen and types her answers, and she says she has solved the problem of face-to-face communication by using interpreters.

When she first came into contact with patients during her third year of medical school, she called about 25 friends together and asked them to volunteer a few hours a month.

On call every third night at a hospital, she took histories and gave physicals with interpreter-friends beside her. The friends, who were not professional interpreters, used speech but no sign language.

An Ability to Improvise

If Pachciarz could not lip-read a patient, the interpreter would automatically repeat so Pachciarz could lip-read the interpreter. When the patient did not understand the less-than-full speech of Pachciarz, the interpreter would repeat the doctor’s remarks for the patient.

Pachciarz also improvised in other areas. When she needed a stethoscope, she attached it to an oscilloscope. Now she evaluates the heart by reading sound tracings on an oscilloscope screen.

Pachciarz uses a beeper that vibrates rather than making a sound, and she types pathology reports rather than dictate, which is standard practice.

“There was a lot of juggling and it is hard to explain how a miracle had to happen almost every day of medical school, especially the third year, for me to get through,” she said.

Such resilience was not new. The eldest of six children, Pachciarz attended some grade school classes for the deaf but generally matriculated with hearing students.

“I was (am) a voracious reader,” she wrote on an application a few years ago about the experience, “and this enabled me to . . . advance at the same rate as hearing children and I was the only deaf child to be ‘mainstreamed.’

“Rather than relying on lip reading the teacher, which is inefficient, frustrating (and a burden on the teacher), I would look at classmates’ notes,” copying them to study from.

Relying again on classmates’ notes in high school, she said a teacher prohibited her from taking chemistry because she would knock over chemicals.

Pachciarz insisted on enrolling and was “deliberately given the grade of C the first term. However, my high school graduation was highlighted by a second-term grade of A and an admission of prior bias.” She graduated seventh in a class of 84.

At the University of Illinois she played intercollegiate softball, basketball and volleyball and acted as night sports editor for the school newspaper, the Daily Illini. She also majored in microbiology and zoology and took the pre-medicine curriculum.

‘I Listened to No One’

“Everyone advised me to forget about medical school,” she said. “I listened to no one.”

Nearing graduation in 1962, Pachciarz began applying to medical schools.

She continued applying as she earned a master’s degree at the University of Illinois in 1965 and a Ph.D. at St. Louis University in 1971, but the medical schools argued that the accomplishments proved she belonged in science, not medicine.

By the mid 1970s, when she was a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, every medical school in the United States refused her.

In 1979, however, she took an interpreter to admissions interviews at the University of Louisville. She said interpreters, which had been in short supply until the mid 1970s, made a big difference. She was admitted.

“If you just met Judy you might understand half of what she said . . . and your immediate reaction might be, ‘Oh, no, . . . ‘ because you depend totally on your auditory (sense),” said Carole Billone, a deaf teacher who is director of the World Games and who sat next to Pachciarz during a recent interview.

Interpreter Keeps Low Profile

“But through an oral interpreter who keeps a very low profile you’re completely engrossed in her achievements.”

“She was a proven success academically (when we considered her application),” said Dr. Leah Dickstein, associate dean of student affairs at the University of Louisville medical school. “She didn’t display a lot of self-pity.”

Pachciarz says she realized when she turned 37 that she had spent half of her life trying to become a doctor, but she looks incredulous when somebody asks why she never gave up.

“My generation is the era of John Kennedy,” she said. “ . . . Tempered by adversity and disciplined by commitment and unable to accept the common expectation of what the deaf can or cannot do. . . .

“I never thought about quitting. . . . . I’m contrary in that if somebody tells me no and I knew it was not a valid reason, there must be a valid reason to convince me.”