Northwestern Medicine interpreter bridges communication gap for McHenry County families affected by COVID-19

Martha Moreno of Lake in the Hills tried to check on her 28-year-old son through his bedroom door as he battled what he suspected to be COVID-19 in April last year, but he kept telling her to stay away so she wouldn’t get sick.

Over the course of a week or so, he had stopped eating the food she prepared for him and then stopped responding to her calls and text messages, Moreno said in an interview Tuesday. She had been trying to see him, so he barricaded the door out of concern for her safety, but she said she pressed her ear to the wood every night to make sure he was breathing.

One night, Moreno said she heard her son make a terrible noise, as if he was gasping for air, and then he went silent. When he didn’t answer her, she burst through the door to find that he was not breathing.

She called 911 and frantically asked for an ambulance, but the person on the other end of the line did not speak Spanish and was not connecting her with anyone who did, she recalled.

“I was hugging him, and I said to myself, ‘I don’t care if I catch [the virus]. If he dies, I die,’ ” Moreno said, speaking in Spanish.

She yelled for the two children she was watching while their parents, friends of the family, were out of town. They spoke English and were able to translate the request to the dispatch operator, she said.

The lapse in time it took to convey this message likely was only minutes, but as Moreno sat in her son’s bed hugging his unconscious body, she said it felt like hours.

The ambulance took Moreno’s son, Francisco Roman, or “Paco,” to Northwestern Medicine Huntley Hospital, where he was diagnosed with COVID-19, Moreno said.

It was then, as Moreno sat reeling from the trauma of witnessing what she said she was sure to be her son’s death, that she was connected with Northwestern Medicine’s interpreter, Viviana Avila.

“You can just imagine the gratitude I felt in that moment,” Moreno said. “It was the best thing that could have happened to me in the middle of all of the sadness I was going through. ... For me, she was an angel.”

Roman regained consciousness long enough to give his doctors his mother’s phone number as his emergency contact and to let them know that she did not speak English, Avila recalled in an interview Thursday.

“The [emergency room] staff are phenomenal in facilitating interpretation services,” Avila said. “So right away we were able to call her and have a three-way conversation to let her know what was happening, let her know the situation and, you know, introduce myself.”

Soon after, Roman’s condition worsened, and he had to be placed on a ventilator to help him breathe.

He remained in a comatose state for almost a month, and Moreno said Avila was the only reason she was able to cope with the stress of not being at his side. Instead, she said, she would drive to the parking lot of the Huntley hospital and sit in her car praying for her son’s recovery.

Avila supported her every step of the way, communicating new information from her son’s nurses, taking her questions and even praying with her, Moreno said.

Roman was the first severe case of COVID-19 that Avila was assigned to, and she said the reality of the situation hit her hard as she listened to the desperation in his mother’s voice on that first phone call.

“Coming from a family with limited English-proficient family members, I was thinking, ‘What would we want someone to do for us?’ ” Avila said. “Her son was so young, and so I was like, ‘Anything that’s needed – just call me, call me. I don’t care if it’s at 2 in the morning.’ ”

Avila said she was inspired to enter the interpretation field in part because when she was a child, she played a role similar to the two children Moreno was babysitting. It is a role, she said, of many children of non-English-speaking parents – the role of impromptu interpreter.

“One of the things that I had to do growing up was that, to an extent, to help my family out here and there, and I loved it,” Avila said. “I loved the feeling of really being able to help the culture that is in this area.”

The pride that she took in being able to help her family in this way led to a fascination with languages that would endure into her adult years, Avila said. She studied sign language and French and wound up earning a number of certifications in Spanish language specific to the medical field.

Avila began working as a professional medical interpreter with Centegra Health System 15 years ago, remaining with the health system when it merged with Northwestern Medicine in 2018. She is based at the Huntley location and also supports other Northwestern Medicine hospitals in the northwest suburbs.

She said she feels just as passionately about her job today as she did when she started more than a decade ago, as it is a crucial piece in providing equal access to health care for people of all backgrounds.

Non-English-speaking families often do not know that they have a legal right to be provided with an interpreter when attending a medical facility, and sometimes, the level of care they receive suffers as a result, Avila said.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Illinois last March, Avila said her job became even more crucial as health care workers were pulled in all directions “trying to save lives,” but the need to dispel confusion for Spanish-speaking families remained.

In McHenry County, Hispanic or Latino residents suffer from COVID-19 infection at a rate of about 939 positive cases per 10,000 people compared with a rate of about 397 cases per 10,000 white residents, according to the county’s online dashboard of COVID-19 data.

“It is very sad that the numbers are so high,” Avila said. “When it comes to a low-income setting, you’ll have a lot of family members that will live together in the same household, so the risk of infection is so much higher. ... You have the communities that possibly can’t just work from home. It’s not very possible for them at times. So now you have someone who may be ill, but they need to continue to work.”

When it all began, the language barrier that Avila’s patients faced heightened the fear around this new, unknown virus that was ripping through the country. Suddenly, instead of offering her services in person, Avila was translating information through three-way phone calls between doctors, patients and family members who were even more emotional because they could not visit their loved ones.

In the case of Moreno, Avila said she promised her that she would call every time there was an update on her son’s condition because she knew that Moreno would be up all night, waiting by the phone, if she thought there was a chance she might miss something.

Even now, when Moreno’s son is back at home and just about fully recovered from the effects of being on ventilator support for weeks, she said she still thinks about Avila and everything she did for her family.

“Right now there is this pandemic, but there are always people who are sick,” Moreno said. “And for people like me that don’t speak the language, it can be very hard and scary. That is why it is so important what people like [Avila] are doing.”