Deaf brother at surgeon’s side
Instead of asking for surgical instruments in the operating room by speaking, Dr. Ray Tesner uses sign language and nonverbal cues to communicate with younger brother Tim.
Ray is a sports-medicine orthopedic surgeon at Ohiohealth Grant Medical Center, and Tim is a surgical technician who is deaf. The duo have both been working together at Ohiohealth for 35 years, starting only months apart.
“He’s really good mechanically, so he’s very valuable,” Ray said.
Ray, 67, and Tim, 66, grew up in Warren in northeastern Ohio with their younger sister, Carol.
“You got the brother thing, and you got the deaf thing,” Ray said. "Brothers can be brothers, and we were always fighting. He was outgoing, very personable, very lovable, so when we would go somewhere with a little deaf kid, he would be the star of the show, and he loved it.”
Their parents sent Tim to the Fort Lauderdale School for the Deaf in Florida from age six to 15 so he could learn how to read lips. When Tim returned to Ohio, his parents wanted him to assimilate with his peers, so he attended Warren G. Harding High School in Warren.
Tim started seriously learning sign language at Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Missouri. After graduating in 1977, he was a mechanic for the city of Warren and maintained its police cars.
Ray, meanwhile, was an athlete as a youth. As a linebacker at Penn State University, he played for Hall of Fame coach Joe Paterno when the Nittany Lions won the 1974 Orange Bowl. He went to the University of Missouri School of Medicine and came to Columbus around 1980 for his orthopedic residency at Ohiohealth.
Ray encouraged Tim to go to school to earn his surgical technician certification because he enjoyed working with his hands. The orthopedic surgeon had training in Lansing, Michigan, and noticed that Lansing Community College had a surgical technician program and a strong program for the deaf.
“It just dawned on me that since they had the deaf interpreters there, maybe (Tim) could go to surgical tech school there and be my surgical tech because he’s mechanically inclined,” Ray said.
Ray asked Tim what he thought about going back to school for his surgical technician certification; Tim said that was a good idea.
“You understand hammer and saw,” Ray recalls telling Tim.
Tim went to Lansing Community College for 2 1/2 years and earned his surgical technician certification. He started working for Ohiohealth with his brother in 1985 and hasn’t looked back.
Tim has been working in the operating room for so long that he is usually able to anticipate what his brother and other surgeons need before they even ask for it. He pays close attention to what’s going on.
“He knows what I need next, and he’s helping me,” Ray said.
Reading lips goes only so far in the operating room, though, because everyone is wearing a surgical mask, so the surgeons and nurses rely heavily on nonverbal communication, such as putting two fingers together to represent scissors.
“There’s really not much communication when you’re doing the same thing all the time. It’s pretty much the same,” Tim signed as Ray interpreted.
Dr. Nate Long, an orthopedic surgeon at Grant, has been working with Tim for 17 years. He said it took some getting used to.
“I knew nothing about sign language, and so he taught me quite a bit of sign (language), which was really nice,” Long said. “It was a bit of an adjustment, but it went really smoothly, mostly because he was so experienced. It wasn’t him that needed training; it was me.”
Long said he has learned the signs for most of the surgical instruments so he can communicate with Tim in the operating room, but Tim often already knows what is needed.
“He’s usually two or three steps ahead of what I’m trying to do,” Long said. “He’s been around for so long and worked with us for so long that a lot of the time he just hands us what we need without even being asked.”
If there is confusion, Long said, the surgeon or nurse can write a message.
Dr. Stephen Wiseman, an orthopedic surgeon at Grant, has worked with Tim for about nine years and communicates with him using nonverbal cues such as cupping his hand into a hook to look like an orthopedic retractor.
“It’s like he has an extra sense,” he said. “His other senses are rather heightened to the point where he can pick up what you’re trying to accomplish.”
Wiseman said that surgical residents are “usually baffled and dumbfounded” the first time they see Tim in the operating room.
As for the Tesners, even in the operating room, brothers can be brothers.
“Generally in surgery, the nurse, the assistant, the tech listens to the doctor and doesn’t argue,” Ray said. But when it’s a brother, that’s not always the case, he said, laughing.
Tim said working with his older brother is “sometime good, sometime bad.”
“He tries to say you’re the boss, you’re the doctor, I got to listen,” Tim signed, joking back.
Despite the playful banter, the brothers wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I like working with him,” Ray said. “He’s very good. All the other doctors like working with him because he’s smart.” mhenry@dispatch.com @megankhenry
A Franklin County judge has awarded more than $42 million to three Ohio school districts after ruling that they were short-changed in state education funding.
Common Pleas Judge Gina R. Russo found that the Ohio Department of Education failed to follow state law in calculating aid and instead used its own formula, resulting in reductions in funding to the Cleveland, Dayton and Toledo school districts from 2005 through 2007.
Russo wrote in her Sept. 10 decision: “The General Assembly decided the proper way to calculate formula ADM (average daily membership) and pay for add-in students” in state law. …
”While ODE (Ohio Department of Education) may believe substitutions of CSADM (community school average daily membership) results in better, more accurate numbers, the fact remains, pursuant to (state law), formula ADM is not to be recalculated or reduced using data provided by community schools.”
Ohio’s complex school-funding system is based on average daily membership, which is the number of students attending a district school in the first full week of October and the number of students entitled to attend but who have opted to go to a privately operated charter or community school. The number can be increased later in the school year to account for students who enroll in charter schools after the October count and were not previously counted.
To fund community schools, the district is first credited for the student and then receives a deduction that is paid to the student’s school.
Unlike districts, community schools report their attendance monthly to the Department of Education. The two counts usually don’t match.
Russo noted in her ruling that the Department of Education erred by using the enrollment figure provided by the community school instead of the district’s October number. As a result, each of the three districts was billed for students it never got credit for having, and thus received less state aid than it was entitled to.
Dayton Schools was awarded the largest amount: $23.6 million.
“Our students who lost educational opportunities because of the Ohio Department of Education’s failure to follow the funding formula are likely long gone from our district,” Superintendent Elizabeth Lolli said in a statement.
“But the funding that flows from the court’s decision will provide an opportunity for students filling their seats today.”
The state was ordered to pay $13.7 million to Cleveland schools and $4.9 to Toledo schools.
The Columbus district did not experience such a loss and was not involved in the case.
Previously, the Cincinnati district was awarded $6 million in a separate lawsuit based on similar claims. After that case, Ohio lawmakers included a provision in a state budget law to prevent further claims against the Department of Education.
Department spokeswoman Mandy Minick said the agency had no comment about the ruling.
A delay in paying the schools could be costly for the state.
“Post-judgment interest awarded by the court on the entire award is accruing from the date of the decision at a rate of up to $175,000 a month,” said Jim Hughes, an attorney with the Columbus-based Bricker & Eckler firm, which represented the schools. ccandisky@dispatch.com @ccandisky