Hard Work, Late Hours, No Pay : Volunteers: Their numbers are few, but those who report for duty between dusk and dawn are fast becoming an integral part of Valley hospital staffs.; <i> Szymanski is a regular contributor to Valley View.</i>

Anyone walking into Encino Hospital at 5 on Wednesday or Friday morning might first be greeted by Kea Lane, a 4-foot-10 red-haired woman in a yellow smock.

Lane registers patients, calls a doctor or a nurse, and escorts patients to the proper rooms.

In the dead hours of pre-dawn, she seems to have full run of the hospital. She scolds nurses for keeping a messy refrigerator, calms patients who can’t sleep and walks the halls to see what needs to be done. Meanwhile, her husband, Herman, carts blood samples to the lab, delivers medication to preoperative and brings coffee to anxious families in the waiting room.

Kea and Herman Lane, both 76, are volunteers, two of about 3,400 people who work without pay at hospitals in the San Fernando Valley. They are among only a handful who work odd hours--either late at night or very early in the morning. They perform duties that range from assisting in emergency rooms to diapering newborn babies to filing medical forms. Some put in their time at the hospital after working full time at their regular, day jobs.

“Volunteers today want to be creative, to make a difference,” said Lillian Bloom, volunteer services director for the past 10 years at Encino Hospital. “Volunteers are becoming a more necessary part of hospital staffs.”

With medical costs soaring, most Valley hospitals have a volunteer program. Very few, however, offer night shifts. The few volunteers who work during those often- tumultuous hours between dusk and dawn are unsung heroes.

The examples are dramatic. At St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, a machinist-by-day spends nights in the recovery room, and a fire captain works late hours with the terminally ill. At Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Panorama City, a social worker pays a baby-sitter to care for her three small children so that she can volunteer at night.

“I volunteer until 11:30 and it’s worth every minute,” said Jay Savoy, a 41-year-old single Van Nuys mother of 2-, 3- and 7-year-olds. “I do it for selfish reasons. I get so much satisfaction out of it. It’s better than any drug you can use.”

Savoy said she sees heartbreak every day and, after her own miscarriage, she wants to make hospital stays as pleasant as possible for others.

At Kaiser, she spends hours talking to the elderly, cleans and bathes patients, entertains in the children’s ward--she dressed in a blue bunny suit last Easter--and isn’t afraid to hug a person with AIDS.

“I get furious seeing how some family and staff treat people as untouchable when someone’s terminal,” said Savoy, who described herself as non-religious. “If I get sick helping others, then so be it.”

Not all volunteers get such hands-on jobs, but at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, they help with some of the most crucial cases. On a recent Saturday night, an ambulance radioed in a code green--incoming severe emergency--and X-ray technicians, radiologists and nurses scrambled to prepare Trauma Room 1. Supervising surgeon Dr. Christojohn Samuel snapped on rubber gloves. Assistant head nurse Kyung Lee sought out Joan DuPont, calling: “Auto versus pedestrian in five minutes.”

DuPont, 61, volunteered at the trauma unit when it opened six years ago and has since become an integral part of the staff even though she’s unpaid. Responding to the emergency, she grabbed a clipboard with a form and waited at the door. A nurse wrote “91-203-0” on a wall chart. When the ambulance crew wheeled in a man groaning in pain with a bloody leg, DuPont’s was the first face the patient saw.

“How are you? Where do you feel the pain?” she asked. She filled out the form as doctors cleaned the wound, then she put a name to the number on the wall, writing “Raymond Slaughter” on the board.

Then DuPont took the patient’s distraught companion to a waiting room, brought him tissues and tried to comfort him. She checked on the victim’s condition and brought out his wallet. She put on gloves, to protect herself from blood that might have gotten on the wallet, and catalogued the crumpled bills and personal papers in the billfold.

Before the night was over, DuPont also helped with the victim of a gang shooting, a man who survived a six-inch gash from a chain saw and a 3-year-old girl who fell and required surgery.

“It’s usually busier; this wasn’t a six-handkerchief night,” DuPont said calmly.

“It’s not always easy; it’s not for everyone,” she said, almost tearing up as she remembered a 4-year-old girl’s brave fight for life, and the volunteers who helped drive family members to the funeral. “It requires all your skills.”

Volunteers aren’t always accepted by the staff, said DuPont, one of 16 volunteers in the often-emotional, often-gruesome trauma unit. “It took about a year until I felt I was one of the group. Now we’re personal friends.”

Some hospitals need volunteers to do what sometimes seems like tedious work. After five days delivering mail on his appointed rounds, postal worker Richard (Skip) Kirkpatrick, 38, spends his Sunday nights doing paperwork at the emergency room of Humana Hospital West Hills.

“It’s a bad night for watching television, so I figured I might as well do something different,” said Kirkpatrick, who makes entries on the hospital computer and files reports. “What I do here may seem menial, but I see how my work gives the staff time to do what they’re trained to do--attend to patients.”

Kirkpatrick recently received a community service award at his postal service job in recognition of his hospital work, but he is doing it for personal reasons, not recognition. When his 70-year-old mother was dying of cancer last year in Iowa, the volunteers helped his parents so much that Kirkpatrick wanted to do something to thank them. Donating money wasn’t enough. He wanted to do something close to home.

“This isn’t downtown at the missions; this is helping your own community with your own neighbors,” said Kirkpatrick, who often sees people from his mail route. Volunteering led him to an interest in nuclear medicine, and he is exploring a possible new career, but otherwise it’s for purely altruistic reasons.

“There’s a warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you can smooth things out and streamline things for the staff. That’s all the reward I need.”

People who are seeking rewards aren’t good volunteers, said Pat Nolan, Humana Hospital’s volunteer services director. “Some people can’t stick with it,” she said. “It’s not a job where you become a glamorous Florence Nightingale who heals people.”

In fact, Nolan experienced burnout and dropped out of volunteering at a cancer hospice. “Too many people died that I became close to,” Nolan said. “You can’t pay people to do what some of these volunteers go through.”

Yet some volunteers would pay Anne Fastiggi to work in the neonatal care unit at Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys. Fastiggi, the hospital volunteers director for six years, has nearly 300 volunteers who have the stamina and willingness to tackle work with the newborns who are kept in incubators.

One of those volunteers is Marilyn Pesheck, 53, a grandmother of six. Pesheck is a veteran at handling the delicate babies. She diapers them, sings to them and takes them to their mothers for the first time.

“My friends think I’m crazy doing all this work,” Pesheck said, walking one night to Room 248 with a baby girl. The eyes of mother Ginny Tolstad of Valencia brightened as she saw her newborn daughter. Still in bed, the mother was handed the baby by the volunteer. Pesheck sighed as she watched the mother cradling the infant: “This sure beats going home and doing laundry.

“I don’t think of my arthritic knees or my own aches and pains,” Pesheck said. “For me, this isn’t work, it’s play.”

Downstairs at Valley Presbyterian’s information counter, Edna Smith has for 17 years each Monday after dark been delivering flowers, directing visitors and answering questions.

“I like people. I try to ease patients by saying it’s a lovely hotel,” Smith said.

The Sherman Oaks woman said she looks forward to retiring from her full-time day job as a secretary so she can devote more hours to the hospital. “I wrote to several places because I wanted to volunteer, and this hospital is the only one that wrote me back, so they lucked out,” Smith said.

It was luck that also brought Ray Foster to Encino Hospital. After a five-way bypass heart operation two years ago, he has a heart that pumps at 50% capacity, but he feels lucky to be alive. The retired MGM studio metal shop chief comes to the hospital twice a week at 5 a.m. to do mostly clerical work.

Foster said he doesn’t mind what his volunteer duties are. “I want to free up the staff, distribute magazines to patients, whatever,” Foster said. “Anyone can do it. I just can’t sit still, that’s all.”

In May, Foster was admitted to the hospital after congestive heart failure, but just days after his release, he was back volunteering.

Sol Haupman is another worker whose restlessness caused him to volunteer at Encino Hospital. He reports at 4 a.m. three days a week.

The 72-year-old former produce man said he was bored after his 1982 retirement. “I can’t stand staying at home watching television,” he said.

Sometimes friends don’t understand the volunteers’ commitment.

Herman Lane said his friends chastise him about giving away eight years of free time. His retort, he said, is that he can set his own hours and can work with his wife of 53 years, Kea, a retired biochemical researcher.

Herman Lane, a retired General Motors employee, said: “My arthritis keeps me from working on cars. When I retired, I thought I’d play more golf, but my golf game got worse, not better, so now I’m here.”

When Bernice Getzug checked in for foot surgery, she was escorted by Kea Lane to the inpatient office, even though her son, gastroneurologist Sheldon Getzug, is on the medical staff at Encino Hospital. “Someone else has to be there to calm them,” Lane said. “When they find out we’re volunteers, some patients treat us better than they treat the staff.”

“You have to have a bright outlook,” Kea Lane said of her hospital work. She was hospitalized four years ago with breast cancer, but she said, “I feel I was spared and I’m now giving back what I got. I’m very glad I’m alive.”

And when a lonely person comes in from a nursing home and is left alone in a wheelchair, Kea Lane is especially attentive. “Sometimes they cry alone to themselves and say, ‘I’m going to die here.’ I sit down, hold their hands and cry with them.”

The 76-year-old volunteer smiled slightly and added: “When I get old, I’d want someone to do that to me.”