Dayton Hadassah produces educational video about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome

The new video produced and distributed by the Dayton Chapter of Hadassah is not pleasant. If Only We’d Known is its title. In it, an attractive young woman and man muse about what has happened to their lives.

They’re shown arguing about their exhausting, inconsolable baby. Later, the young mother is told that her young son has brain damage from alcohol she drank during her pregnancy. Shock fills the young mother’s face. “So what can we do to fix it?” she asks, blinking.

“There isn’t anything that’s going to fix it,” is the answer.

“I wish someone had told me,” the young woman says.

The fictional couple’s crying baby — like the real children and babies shown in the video — has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, or FAS. His brain was harmed in utero by his mother’s drinking, and no medicine in the world will cure or even mitigate the damage.

There’s nothing slick or packaged about If Only We’d Known. It looks and sounds more like Napoleon Dynamite than The Aviator.

But the video’s raw, impromptu quality suits its difficult topic. The fictional scenes of the teenage couple are interspersed with photos of young faces that look not quite right, and video clips of real-life parents speaking about their lives.

“He bites, he cusses, he hits and he kicks. He’s 9 years old…”  “Kids called him freak, dork, retard…”  “We have no matches, we have no knives…”  “There is no ‘me’ socially…”

Metaphorically, these parents are bleeding all over the screen.

“Did you think it was tough?” asks Ann Baum, the video’s writer and producer. “Good. I wanted it even tougher.”

‘Totally preventable’
“These are not fun kids to raise,” Baum says about FAS children. “They don’t cuddle, they don’t love you back. They have night terrors. As they get older, they don’t have insight, and they’ll lie and not even understand they’re lying. And this is totally preventable if a pregnant woman doesn’t drink.  That’s why we’ve got to stigmatize drinking in pregnancy.”

Baum knows. She and her husband adopted a son who turned out to have FAS. Now 26, his life — and his parents’ life — has been a struggle.

“I thought, I’ll be a good mother and he’ll be fine,” she says. “That’s not how it works. He used to try to pick his skin off because he was so uncomfortable in it.”

Now, Baum’s son works a fast food job and lives with friends.

“That’s about what he can handle,” Baum says. “He’s had to see his sisters get an education and be successful, and he’d get so frustrated when he didn’t have a nice house and a nice car. He just can’t understand why. With FAS, the reasoning’s not there.

“A lot of people, when they see this video, say ‘Oh, I know someone like that!’ They just didn’t recognize what it was from.”

FAS is now the leading cause of mental retardation in the United States.

Helen Markman, a fellow Hadassah member, has been calling “everywhere I can think of” to ask if they want a video and its accompanying informational folder, which contains discussion suggestions, teen-friendly puzzles, and detailed information on FAS and its prevention.

“Hadassah gave Ann the seed money, and she did the rest,” says Helen. “Putting together this video was 110 percent Ann.”

Baum is quick to point out this video could not have been made without two friends and a man named Patrick Hughes.

The gift from Heaven
Four or five years ago, Baum and her Dayton Hadassah FAS Committee looked for a video on FAS that targeted teenagers.  They couldn’t find one.

“Everything I saw was dated and didn’t explain what FAS was,” Baum says.

Her committee received some money to produce its own video project from Dayton Hadassah and Premier Health Associates.

They started by hiring a grant writer to seek more funds. All their grant proposals were rejected.

“It’s just not popular,” Baum says of FAS publicity.  “Anti-abuse and anti-smoking campaigns are popular.”

Discouraged, Baum was in a store with her friend Sue Soifer when Baum spotted a former co-worker, Abdur-Rauf Rashid. She told Rashid about her video woes.

“E-mail me,” he said.

“So I e-mailed him reams of stuff and then he called up and said, ‘I’ve got someone who’ll make your video for you: Patrick Hughes at Dayton Access TV,” Baum recalls.

DATV is Time-Warner Cable’s local channel, and Hughes is a videographer and producer who has worked there for 10 years.

“It’s what I do,” he says of his involvement in Baum’s project. “And this was human interest, public interest. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is a problem that needs to be tackled.  The ignorance level about it is scary.”

“He was a gift from heaven,” Baum says of Hughes.

“We’d gotten quotes of $35-$60,000 to make the video and all I did was cover his expenses. He worked every day and the only time he didn’t show up was when he was in the hospital.”
Interviewed by phone, Hughes chuckles. “That’s right,” he says. “The times I lost the use of my legs, that’s the only times I didn’t make it.”

In 1999, not long before he met Baum, Hughes was a passenger in a Geo Metro that was hit from behind by a semi. The car was totaled and Hughes suffered neck and lower back injuries.

A spinal cord cyst related to that accident led later to his two temporary paralyses, both of which required surgery.

The deep-voiced Hughes is as taciturn as Baum is voluble. Baum describes him as “ultra, ultra-dignified.”

Once, late at night when he and Baum were editing, Hughes told her he believed he’d survived his car crash so that he could work on her project.

The production
Baum and Hughes worked together for three years.

“Ann wrote the script and found the actors,” Hughes says. “Then she had to find parents who’d be on-camera and that took a while. It was mostly adoptive parents who were willing to talk about it.”

To play the young couple with the FAS baby, Ann recruited a neighbor’s daughter, Jennifer Noble, and her friend Sue Soifer’s son, Scott.

For scenes of teenagers partying, Baum enlisted a group of honors students. The counselor in the video is played by a nurse, Kathryn McCombs.

Baum directed while Hughes handled lighting and sound. Her husband also helped tape some scenes. The local music group Frenz contributed music.

For tape of the FAS parents, Baum and Hughes traveled to houses as far away as northern Kentucky.

She and Hughes edited the footage while Hughes added music and special effects — memory sequences in black and white, slow motion, photographs of FAS-afflicted children clicking onto the screen.

Hughes is still working on another effect, a cartoon that will show the fetus’s brain shrinking in the mother’s womb as the mother drinks.

“After seeing what to look for, now I recognize it,” he says of FAS. “People I grew up with, now their behavior makes sense to me.” He mentions a cousin, a childhood friend.

Getting the word out
Locally, Markman and Jan Maharam of Hadassah have been passing out copies of the video and its notebook.

All the Dayton public middle and high schools have it. Kettering and Centerville high schools have it. Daybreak, Womanline, Elizabeth New Life Center, various Catholic high schools have it.

A local private school told Markman it didn’t need the video.

But it’s one thing to get a video distributed, another to get it watched and noticed.

“This will appeal to the kids,” says Geneva Connally, the school nurse at Dayton’s Dunbar High School. She hasn’t used it with students yet, but she plans to have the school’s family life and health teachers show the tape, and wishes out loud that she had a small television and VCR so she could play it in her office.

“I’ve seen all those FAS behaviors in students,” she says, “but parents don’t give you the diagnosis. I’m sure we have a lot. My thing for my students is, don’t drink. It’s the drinking that makes you lose control and that leads to pregnancy.”

In the meantime, the search for publicity for the video and for its cause goes on.

Hughes has shown the video on DATV, and it has also run on cable channels in other cities.

Baum sent the tape to a national FAS organization, but she hasn’t received a response yet.

“It sounds like something that could be nationalized,” says Roberta Elliott, national media affairs director of Hadassah. She explains that the organization’s local chapters work on health issues that “complement and emphasize what goes on at our two Israeli hospitals.”
She says that Hadassah chapters already work with local school systems to promote breast and testicular self-exams in young people.

Baum and Hughes are a little reluctant to talk about it, but it’s clear that they have hopes that a major player – an Oprah, a 60 Minutes, a national organization – will take their cause to a bigger stage.

“If one mother doesn’t drink because of this tape, then it’s worth it,” she says, but her voice belies a yearning that the impact of the tape will be much broader.