Youth Hopes Hospital Project Leaves Indelible Mark

Some stories move along in their own orderly fashion, one step leading to another until the tale is told. But others come in clumps, with long breaks in time and uncertain connections between events.

The story of 13-year-old Matt Martino, his dead grandfather and the white boards falls somewhere in between, meshing a pastor’s lesson with a family’s loss to help more than 200 Southern California hospital patients communicate with their families.

The tale begins with the grandfather, Alfred Eye, 71, an affable country and western buff from Temecula who put in 42 years at defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. “He could never tell us what he did, because whatever he was working on was always secret,” said daughter Kathy Martino, 48, of Orange, a former nurse.

Eye also spent many of those years smoking cigarettes, a habit his family believes caused the chronic emphysema that landed him last March in Inland Valley Regional Medical Center, where doctors placed him on a ventilator. The machine that gave life, though, stole Eye’s voice, the ventilator tube stifling his words before he could form them.

And Eye had a lot to talk about. Love and family. His pains and needs as doctors struggled vainly to reverse the irreversible. His long life, and his imminent death. “He couldn’t talk to anybody,” the daughter said. “Can you imagine not being able to talk?”

The obvious solution--a pad of paper--wasn’t working. Some messages you don’t want to leave for unintended eyes to see. Sometimes the pencil lead breaks, and the used sheets of paper pile up like the castoffs of a frustrated poet.

Grandson Matt looked at the problem, and in a moment of inspiration came up with one of those solutions that was brilliant in its simplicity.

“The thought popped into my head: white board,” Matt said. “We use them at school to do our algebra problems.”

White boards, as eighth-graders like Matt know, are new-generation blackboards, coated pieces of pressed board that you can write on with special markers and then erase with the wipe of a tissue.

It worked like a charm. Eye could scrawl a thought on his letter-sized board, then wipe it away. A man who rarely swore would get a twinkle in his eye, then write a sentence bordering on the racy before snatching the thought back with a wipe of the finger, teasing his family and caregivers.

Matt used the board too. On visits when the family found Eye sleeping, Matt would leave a cartoon figure and a joke, a brightener for when the older man woke up. It became a new conduit of communication between the generations: a final gift, it would turn out, from each to the other.

Eye liked the board so much that he asked his family to get eight more, one for each bed in his ward at Inland Valley to let fellow patients find the voices they too had lost in their battle for health.

Rick Meyer, a respiratory therapist at Orange’s Chapman Medical Center who also works part time at Inland Valley, said the boards reduce frustrations and allow the sick to concentrate on getting well.

“It just gives them the ability to write a joke or say things to one person and then start with a clean slate,” Meyer said, adding that nurses have taken to using the boards too, leaving words of encouragement for patients to see when they wake up.

Two months after Eye was hospitalized, his health deteriorated more and he drifted into a coma. After talking with his doctors, the family acceded to his wishes and the silencing tube was removed. Eye died.

It was a long summer of sadness for family members as they accustomed themselves to the void left by Eye’s death. But life lurched ahead. Matt resumed his hobbies of knife collecting, roller hockey and bike riding. One school year ended and another began and led to the October day when Matt’s pastor at Santa Ana’s Calvary Christian School taught a lesson in resourcefulness.

Adapting a biblical story, the pastor gave Matt and some of his schoolmates $1, $2 and $5 bills and told them to use the money wisely to do good. Some decided to donate their money to victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. Some pooled their cash to help out a teacher with a new baby. A few bought toothbrushes, toothpaste and other items for a church-based mission program.

Matt, for reasons he can’t explain, suddenly thought of his grandfather. “White board” popped back into his head. Using his $2 as seed money, he embarked on a personal campaign to raise cash to buy white boards for hospital patients on ventilators.

He began by tapping his relatives. Then he put a jar in his classroom for fellow students’ spare change. Matt’s take from a family garage sale--$40--was tossed in too, until he had about $600, enough to buy 300 white boards and markers.

Over the last few weeks Matt and his family have been making the rounds of regional hospitals, leaving small stacks of white boards with a message taped to the back telling the story of Alfred Eye’s illness, and silence, and the solution born of love.

“So, if you are receiving one of these boards today,” Matt wrote beneath pictures of him and his grandfather, “please know that my thoughts and prayers are with you.”

A few days ago, Matt had given away more than 200 of the boards to a dozen area hospitals and was working up a list for distributing the 90 boards he had left. He has yet to meet a patient, dealing almost exclusively with nurses in the restricted wards.

“As long as I know they get them, and know they can talk to their families with these, I’m happy,” Matt said, adding that he is trying to think of ways to raise cash for more boards. “It makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something and helped others.”

Meyer, who treated Eye at Inland Valley but didn’t meet Matt until the boy dropped off 40 boards at Chapman, finds inspiration in the effort. “He’s a great kid, a real sincere, neat kid,” said Meyer, 39, of Lake Elsinore. “To see him do something outside of himself, he sets an example that we all can do something.”