Tag: communication

Family Centered Care is a Partnership

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When you take your child to the doctor, or to the hospital, how much do you know about them?  How much do you influence them?  How much influence do you have over the nurses and the front desk staff, the phlebotomist or the technician?  Have you helped create the design of the location, or the layout of the room?  Have you influenced the way the providers interact with you?

How much influence do you want to have?

When Wendy was first sick, many years ago, we had no experience with doctors or hospitals.  We walked into a brand new situation, filled with well meaning and empathetic providers and a brand new Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.  But the unit was so new that no one knew where anything was, and I remember watching doctors rifle through drawers when Wendy was having a hard time breathing in order to get the right equipment to intubate her (put a breathing tube down her throat.)  I remember when she was breathing on her own again and a resident came in with a weird breathing apparatus that they wanted us to use so that Wendy’s lungs could get stronger, and then after the resident leaving, the nurse whispering that she would get us a bottle of bubbles instead.

I remember in this brand new PICU facility having the problem that Wendy wanted to pee on her own (at the age of 3) and there not being a toilet for her.  And I remember in this nice new facility that the television where we were watching the football game caught on fire.

All of these things were totally normal, understandable, but also preventable things. (Well, maybe not the Television Fire.) If a parent had been around to help with the planning of the spaces, to talk with the residents, to be a part of the process, then maybe some of these snafus wouldn’t have happened.

This is the idea behind family centered care.  The idea that as doctors, and nurses and other staffers, you’re not just treating the illness, you’re treating the person.  And with the case of little kids, you’re not just treating the person, you’re treating the entire family.  Lots of changes have been made since the day we walked into Massachusetts General Hospital almost eleven years ago.  Since our first day, the hospital has instituted bedside rounding, where the doctors go into the room to talk to the patient and the families to make a plan for the day, to see if the family has any questions, and to make things as clear as possible.  The nurses call once you’re discharged to see if you have any additional questions, or might have forgotten something, and to help you set up follow up appointments with your providers.  And you have the opportunity to rate your hospital stay, to mention what has worked and what hasn’t worked.

These are great improvements, real changes to the quality of care and the way parents and patients feel a part of the team.  These have been life changing improvements.

But whet if we could do more?

What if family centered care included the systemic planning of the care to begin with? What if families were asked to meet with providers before care ever took place to make the care itself better, seamless care?

I’ve been working toward this goal for a long time, as a member of the Family Advisory Council at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children.  First, I should tell you about the Family Advisory Council.  The FAC is made up of parents, doctors, nurses, social workers, child life specialists, and administrators.  Its goal is to foster better communication between patients, parents and families, and to make the hospital experience better all around.

One of the things that we do is work on projects that we feel are important, like a pediatric wheelchair pilot program.  The hospital didn’t have pediatric wheel chairs, can you believe it? So a group of concerned parents got together with administrators, went through all of the wheelchairs out there, and with the help of an occupational and physical therapist, chose the best one that would serve the needs of the most kids.  The hospital ordered a bunch and the results have been overwhelmingly positive.

Here are some other things that the Family Advisory Council does:

  •  Meet with new residents the very first day of their residency and talk to them about what it’s like to be parents of chronically ill kids and the importance of communication.
  • Meet with fellows who have been through residency and are now seeing patients in clinic and let them ask us questions about challenging interactions with patients and parents.
  • Host an annual Grand Rounds that usually surrounds communication between patients, parents, and providers.
  • Review public health documents before they go out to the public, to make sure that they make sense, that they have  met their goal of communication.
  • Review plans for new spaces to see if there’s anything that might have been missed (more electrical outlets or hooks for coats for example.)
  • Facilitate workshops on the difference between being “courteous” and “helpful” for front desk staff, because it’s possible to be very polite but not the least bit helpful at all.
  • Interview key new staff members who will interact with families, like nurse managers, etc.
  • Sit on standing committees in the hospital including Ethics, Quality & Safety, Inpatient Satisfaction, etc.

The idea is that if parents are a part of multiple systemic areas of the hospital, that the whole experience, for every patient and family, is better, because parents have been a part of the process.

This has been an evolution, each step was challenging.  Just a few years ago I asked if I could be a part of interviewing for a new position and was resoundingly told no.  Change has also been over a long period of time.  I’ve been the parent of a chronically ill child for eleven years, and all of this work is voluntary, and I have a job on top of that.  Other parents on the FAC have similar stories.  You have to have the will and the drive to make the hospital a better place and you have to find champions within the hospital who are willing to see the change as innovation.  Sometimes, that means being abrasive or sitting through discomfort.  A lot of change relies on trust, and trust needs to be built both on the personal level and on the institutional level.  It’s a partnership.

I’ve put this list here not because I want to trumpet our horn, but because these are concrete examples on how your hospital can move forward toward more patient and family centered care. I learned of a lot of this though an organization called The Institute for Patient and Family Centered Care. They are a non-profit organization that helps hospitals really self-evaluate where they are on the care spectrum and how they can move forward.  They’re having an international conference this summer in Baltimore Maryland.  I’ll be there.  If you come, please come by the poster session and say hi.

In a world where health care is already scary, its really great to minimize problems.  Having patients and parents be a part of the planning for systemic care can help to minimize those problems, but because this hasn’t often been done in the past, it’s often met with resistance.   Work through the resistance.  Sit with the discomfort.  Move forward together with trust.  Become a partnership.

 

 

 

Thanks, Carepages.

Posted in communication, hope, UncategorizedTagged , 1 Comment

Carepages goes dark tomorrow and I am going to miss it.  What is Carepages?  It was a health blog that you signed up for to notify your loved ones about your health journey.  We have used it as a lifeline for the past ten years.  When Wendy was super sick, we wrote every day, sometimes twice a day, to keep our loved ones up to date.  As she got stronger and better, we reduced our notifications.  Recently we only used it to mark big milestones.

The thing I loved about Carepages is that it made you really sit down and take stock of the medical day.  In any given day of craziness, it was good to really evaluate what was good, what was bad, and what were the hopes for the next day. And it buoyed our spirits to get messages from our family and friends telling us that they were thinking about us, praying for us, praying for Wendy.  Hospitals can feel isolating, and it was nice to know that people were supporting us from afar.

Today I spent much of the day copying and pasting all of the updates, over 200 of them, over the course of our 10 year medical journey.  I have to be honest, I wept reading a lot of the updates.  Wendy was so young and sick, and I knew, reading the updates, that things were going to get worse before they were going to get better.  I was so young too, and angry at our situation, the unfairness of it all. In 2007 and 2008 Wendy spent every holiday in the hospital, some 180 days.  I left my job, and Michael took an extended leave.  I slept less than three feet from my parents in a hotel room for months, and it became clear that we needed to move into an apartment.  We had two blissful hours with Wendy in the apartment at Christmas, so she could open up her presents, before we had to bring her back to the hospital.

I marked the day that Wendy’s kidneys started working again, the first time we made it home, the day she coded in the PICU, the day she was put on the transplant list. I read the day of her transplant, and the first anniversary, the second anniversary, the fifth anniversary.

As I read, I also read messages from loved ones who hadn’t gotten married yet, or hadn’t had their babies yet.  Friends who hadn’t gotten divorced yet.  Stalwart friends who were battling their own illnesses and have since passed away.  I am so grateful for those messages, to be able to read them, to be able to keep them.

At some point, Michael and I had decided to make Wendy’s Carepage public, so that other people could take comfort in her story, as I had taken comfort in the stories of others over the years, especially when we were looking for stories of kidney transplants.  We had people follow us from all over the world, and they wrote messages of support as well.

I’m going to miss Carepages, it was a part of our life for a long time. Now in the age of facebook and WordPress, it seems almost quaint to have a blog site dedicated just to an illness journey.  Perhaps that’s why it’s going away.  But it marked our lives.   It marked Wendy’s life, her health, her strength.

Today, Carepages showed me how far we’ve come.  A new town, a new home, a new baby (now eight years old), and new friendships along with the strengthening of old friendships. So thank you, Carepages, for everything, for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Thank you for the hope.  Thank you for the journey.

 

When to Divorce Your Doctor?

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I was hot.

I was furious at Wendy’s endocrine practice.  This had been the third time in four years that I couldn’t get Wendy’s school orders without multiple phone calls that required phone trees and leaving messages on answering machines and waiting for someone to get back to me, multiple times. Every delay each year was for  a different reason:  wrong address, new medical management system, most schools start after Wendy’s school.  But I had had enough.

I decided that I needed to look elsewhere for another place for Wendy and for me.  This just wasn’t working for us.  This divorce has been a long time in coming, but like real marriages, there are positives and negatives to a medical relationship.    It’s when the bad outweighs the good, that you can safely feel like it’s time to walk away and join another practice.

But I didn’t want to do it just because I was angry, and it wasn’t because I had gotten bad news that I just couldn’t accept.  An important thing I learned is that in medical relationships, as in most relationships,  you can’t expect perfection, but you should expect to feel satisfied with the way you are being treated.  And I didn’t feel like we were being treated well.

Add to this the fact that Wendy’s actual endocrinologist was leaving for another opportunity, so we felt like if we were going to make a move, that now would be a good time, because we were going to have to meet and use a new doctor anyway, so we might want to consider going to another facility all together.

Luckily we had many other options, living in a city like Boston.  Not only do we have our hospital, but there are two other pediatric hospitals in the city.  Additionally, we have the Joslin Diabetes Clinic, the oldest and most prestigious medical center for diabetes in the world.  We had a lot of choices, and Michael and I really weighed them, because all of them were good options.

We decided to go with Joslin, because like Mass General Hospital, Wendy could transition from a pediatric patient to an adult patient within the same institution.  Also, since Joslin is a clinic and not an inpatient facility, Wendy’s hospital home would still be Mass General (as she would still see nephrology there.)  Finally, with Joslin there was an opportunity to possibly be part of new and interesting clinical trials that used a large sample size available to Joslin.  Taken all together, it was worth a try.

To be clear, we did not go down in a blaze of glory, when we left the endocrine practice, we just called Wendy’s primary care doc and stated that since Wendy’s doctor was leaving that we’d like a referral for a new doctor at a new clinic.  We made the appointment at Joslin with a new endocrinologist, a new Nurse Practitioner, and a dietician.  We were told to expect to be there all day and to bring Wendy’s records.

The night before the appointment, I was really nervous, because it was the first time in a long time that we were dealing with new doctors in a new place.  I may have punched the printer in the morning using colorful vocabulary because it wouldn’t print Wendy’s labs from the patient gateway.

Ok, I may have punched it twice.

And the drive there was awful, it’s in a super-congested part of the city, there’s no good way to get there.  I thought to myself, “This better be amazing, because to drive here four times a year is really going to suck.”  Parking was just as bad, and there ‘s no coffee shop, no food of any kind in the building.

But the nurse practitioner was great.  She was patient and she answered all of our questions.  Wendy liked her right away.  She looked at Wendy’s numbers and made a few small changes, and then gave us all of her information as to how we could get a hold of her personally, not through multiple phone trees and receptionists and answering machines.

Wendy said that she felt like she knew this nurse practitioner more in the fifteen minutes we spoke to her than in the many years she knew the endocrine nurses at Mass General.  She also admitted, later, that she might have felt better about the new nurse because she wasn’t super sick when she met her, and because we already knew about diabetes.  Both observations were astute especially for a teenager.

When we met the doctor, who had been a fellow at Mass General, she complimented Wendy on her video for the Emergency Department, because she had been at the Grand Rounds where Wendy spoke about it, and she remembered to say something to her about it.  This had an instant effect on Wendy.  It was a great way to build rapport.

We broke for lunch and walked around the corner for sandwiches, and Wendy was excited to go to a new place to eat. When we go to Mass General, we often go to the same restaurants, as if in a rut.  Partially it’s because it’s easy and it’s comfortable. But Wendy really liked trying somewhere new and said so.

We arrived back to the clinic in time to meet the dietician.  Wendy really liked what she had to say. They went over her daily intake, each meal, each serving.  She helped Wendy come up with a plan to eat a little more calcium, a little more protein, which involved a cup of high protein chocolate milk with dinner.  Wendy was thrilled.  I gave in to the pressure and we now have it in our fridge.  It’s a little treat that makes Wendy feel like she’s in more control of her life.  Oh, and it’s chocolate.  At dinner.

After we got home, and after dinner, we all sat down together to debrief the day and figure out if we really wanted to make the change.   We decided we did.  Wendy liked the staff and felt heard.  I felt like Wendy was getting positive messages from adults that weren’t just me and her dad about her diabetes.  I also liked that Wendy was taking a little more control of her health, even if it included extra protein chocolate milk.

I called the old endocrine practice and cancelled our next appointment.  I just said we have decided to go with Joslin instead since Wendy’s doctor is leaving.  I need to decide if I’m going to write a letter to them explaining that we just didn’t feel like we  were getting the attention we needed with hard to attain answers to questions, no meetings with dieticians, and no real transition as Wendy got older.  I need to figure out the right tone, because we were grateful for the care we got when Wendy was younger, it just didn’t feel like we were being supported as she was entering her teenage years.

I’m still thinking about that part.

Divorcing your doctor is hard because you’ve built a relationship and sometimes it’s all you know.  But if you don’t feel like you’re being heard or taken care of, it’s worth it to look elsewhere.  You already know what you have, you don’t know what is possible.  So go find out, gather your data, and make a decision.

I wish you luck, whatever you decide.  It’s not easy.

It’s harder, I think, when it’s your kid, because you want to do the best by them, even when you’re not exactly sure what the best thing is.  Hopefully,  you can decide together.

 

Communication & Hope, Thanks to Hospital Chaplains.

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What engenders hope?  Who holds hope?  How can a person foster hope in another?

These ideas roll around in my head, when I am meditating, or when I am exercising. I read about hope, I study it, I read to see what others have said about it.  I know, it’s unusual, but I usually find that when I’m on a project like this, there’s a reason, that things connect to it like a magnet.

Recently, I was sent two pieces of information about Hospital Chaplains, and how they engender hope through communication.  These pieces came to me from different sources, one from the Pediatric Chaplain at Massachusetts General Hospital, and one from the Bishop of the Delaware-Maryland Synod for the Evangelical Lutheran Church.   Both of them saw these items and thought I’d be able to blog about them.  And these stories have been rolling around in my head, along with thoughts about communication and hope.

I know, it’s a pretty messy place inside my brain.

The Chaplain of MGH sent me information about the Wilbert Foundation.  The Wilbert Foundation is a foundation that supports pediatric chaplains of hospitals, with support groups, continuing education training….and they Provide Bertie Bear Boxes.

Bertie Bear

This is Bertie Bear.

Bertie Bear comes in a box that is designed to look like his home.  He comes with a backpack, a note pad, and a maze. These are meant to keep the sick and sometimes scared child busy.  But these are not the most important things in the box.  The most important thing is the white board:

White Board with Emotions.PNG

The white board comes with emotions and a prompt.  So the child can write how he or she is feeling, and why that is.  Imagine if doctors walked into the hospital room and could tell by a glance not only how you are feeling physically, but what your emotional state is too. When emotions go up, vocabulary goes down, it’s hard to talk about how you are feeling.  Imagine if you didn’t have to say it — you could just put a magnet on a board.

Now imagine if you couldn’t speak at all.

That’s when the  other piece of information came to me from Bishop Bill Gohl.  It was about a chaplain who designed a board that allows people in the ICU to express their emotions and ask for simple comforts.  It’s called a spiritual care board, but again, it serves many more purposes:

Spiritual Care Board.PNG

The idea with the spiritual care board is that you can discuss your emotions, and then ask for help. Perhaps you are feeling helpless, and would like to have someone read to you.  Perhaps you are feeling uneasy and would like to have someone hold your hand.  You can point to the pictures, and a caretaker can understand what you want.

Imagine the relief when your emotional pain is registered and attended to when your physical pain is also registered and attended to.  That’s when real healing begins.

When people feel heard, when they are able to communicate, they feel more hopeful that they will get better.  They feel that they can begin to move forward.  These are powerful tools that can and should be used in both pediatric and adult hospitals, don’t you think?

Here is the link to the Wilbert Foundation, to learn more about Bertie Bears.

Here is a link to a CNN story about the Spiritual Care Boards.

Consider mentioning these to your local hospital, or your congregation.  It might be worth a sponsorship from your church, synagogue, or mosque.

More communication is needed in this world.  So is more hope.

 

 

Impatient, Empowered

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Yesterday, Wendy received the Patient View Impact Award, the only national award given to patients who make a personal impact in medicine. Payette was given a special award too, for being a champion of the project.  (In reality, without them it wouldn’t have been possible. )  The awards were given by the Patients’ View Institute, a non-profit organization committed to organizing and amplifying the patient voice, so we can have more impact on the quality of care we receive.

The Patients’ View Institute collects patients’ stories, organizes them, and allows them to be viewed by others going through similar circumstances.  It also awards a few great stories once a year at the annual meeting of the Leapfrog Group.  The Leapfrog Group is a non-profit committed to transparency in medicine.  Hospitals send them their quality and safety reports, and Leapfrog gives them an A-F grade based upon their reporting. The best hospitals are brought to this annual meeting to receive their award.

So, Wendy was given an award in front of representatives of the best hospitals for quality and safety in the nation.  Think on that for a second.  If you could tell three hundred people who have the power to change the day-to-day  operations of a hospital, if you had their undivided attention, what would you say to them?

Here’s what struck me about the day.  Everyone in the room was trying to make healthcare better.  Everyone was worried about the cost, the consistency, and the safety of healthcare.  But most of the people were looking at it from the institutional side of it, the bean-counting side, if you will.

Wendy’s story was one of a few individual stories of patients who were empowered to make change in the medical world.  The most prominent story, however, was the keynote speaker, Epatient Dave, who talks about patient engagement and empowerment.  His TED talk is one of the most viewed talks in history.  I highly recommend it.   He empowers patients to know their health history, and to connect with each other.

Another parent was there winning an award, named Becky White, is also the parent of a medically complex child.  Not 0nly did she go back to school to get her nursing degree, but she went back again to get her MBA.  She stressed that as a parent of a medically complex child, that she needed to know how to speak three languages:  the language her child would understand, the language the medical world would understand, and the language that the business world would understand.  She invites hospital administration to round with her when she is taking care of children so that they understand what is necessary for caring for a medically complex child.

Another parent, Liz Minda, is an advocate for her child who has had over 11,000 seizures in her lifetime.  Liz advocates for medical marijuana, and has spoken to media and legislatures about its impact on her daughter’s health.

You can read about both of these women here in the PVI press release.

It took me some time to process the whole day.  There was so much information, so  much intention by everyone in the room to improve health care, that it was hard to keep it all straight.  I took copious notes.

What struck me about the other patients and parents, though, was that they were both empowered and impatient.  They were there because they were creating change.  Wendy and I were there because we wanted change too.  The kids in these stories are extreme cases, but they don’t have to be, they don’t have to be the kids who are frequent fliers in the hospitals.  I think, though, that the amount of time our children spend in the hospitals make us as parents want to make the entire medical experience better.

Some people write books about their experience; some write blogs.  Some people speak at TED talks.  Some people create cartoons.

What can the average person do?  That’s what I was thinking about last night. Does it have to be such a grand gesture?  Of course not.  Those things get noticed, surely, but lots of good can be done without a media blitz surrounding it.

I came to this idea of the Patient and Family Advisory Council.  It is a council at hospitals that really bridges the divide between patients (or families) and providers.  Let’s say a family has an experience at a hospital and they know a way that it can be improved.  For example, a family notices that there are no pediatric wheelchairs.  Where can they go to get them ordered?  The Family Advisory Council.  A family notices that the pain medication that was prescribed in the Emergency Department doesn’t transfer up in the orders when they reach the floor.  Who can they tell?  How do they create the change?  The Family Advisory Council can point them in the right direction.

When Wendy and I wrote the story for the Emergency Department Cartoon, I brought it to the Family Advisory Council to help me figure out what to do with it.  The co-Chair of the FAC, Sandy Clancy, helped me to create a committee of people who needed to see it to approve the content, including doctors, nurses, social workers, child-life specialists, psychologists, you name it.  There would have been no way for me to know whom to contact or how to do it.

Likewise, the Family Advisory Council is a resource for the hospital as well.  Different departments come to us for advice about any variety of things.  New blueprints for new departments are brought to the FAC to see if they have any suggestions.  FAC members review and edit information that is given to the public. Parents speak to residents on their first day in their new job about the importance of bedside rounding.  We even sponsor a Grand Rounds every year about family centered care.

I wrote a piece about family advisory councils for Courageous Parents Network a few months ago.  You can read it here.  (It lists me as Casey Daniels, though.  🙂

If you want to be a part of a Family Advisory Council, contact your hospital and see if they have one.  Usually there’s an application process.  If your hospital doesn’t have one, consider starting one.  The Institute for Patient and Family Centered Care has created a whole series on how to start an FAC in your area.  You can look at their information here.

In conclusion, though it’s not exactly important what I said at the conference with 300 quality and safety people in it, since I posed the question, I will tell you what I decided to say, concerning the cartoon.

I said, since we all arrived by airplane and every airplane in America has a safety introduction before they take off, everything from fastening your seatbelt to what to do in the event of a water landing, why don’t we have introductions to every Emergency Department in America, when people are sick and scared and hurt?

Though it may not change anything, hopefully it gave people something to think about on their flight home.

 

 

 

 

 

Understanding, But Not Sharing, Despair

Posted in communication, Compassion, coping, Family, Resilience, transplant, UncategorizedTagged , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I want to get this blog post just right, and yet I’m afraid that I will fail miserably.

But I’m going to try.

I read today about the Short family, a family from Pennsylvania who died of an apparent murder-suicide.  They had a chronically ill kid, a child who had received a heart transplant.  They had been featured in their local newspaper when their daughter Willow received the heart. The story was hopeful, it was upbeat.  There was a future thanks to a generous donor.  People like to think of it as a happy ending, but in reality organ donation is only a beginning.

A year later, the same family was featured in a New York Times article, detailing how hard it is to get the anti-rejection drugs compounded and filled, where it shows a picture of the mom dosing up the medicines, which by the way are the exact same medicines my daughter takes.  We have shared the same terror of worrying that you are going to run out of the medication that is keeping your daughter alive because of some stupid rule made by either the pharmacy or your insurance company.

In fact, up to this point, I know exactly how they feel.  Scared, hopeful, struggling.  There’s not a lot of place in this world for a sick kid.  I’ve said that for so many years now I feel like a broken record.  Not a lot of place, so parents of these kids keep fighting.  Fighting for prescriptions, fighting for 504s or IEPs in school.  Fighting for doctors’ appointments, fighting to be heard by doctors and nurses, by other hospital staff, by pharmacies and insurance companies.  Giving the thumbnail version of your child’s illness to every new person on the phone, every health care worker you meet, every time.

It’s exhausting.

And yet, none of us know what we sign up for as parents, and we have to move forward.  We are not just caregivers, but nurses, social workers, dieticians, pharmacists, and medical managers.  No one is going to do it for us, and no user manuals are included.

There are other kids in the family, kids who might not get as much attention as they deserve because the parents have to deal with the sick kid, the emergency, the crisis.  They are unwitting victims of the tragedy.  That adds pressure, too, the fact that you know you’re not able to be the kind of parent you want to be to all of your kids because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

There are stresses with work, normal stresses, but nothing more stressful than the idea of losing your job, because you need those health insurance benefits more than anything else.  So you make fewer waves even if something might be wrong because you can’t afford to be unemployed.  There are sacrifices you make, as little as sleep or as large as a professional life, in service to the illness and the medical needs of the chronically ill child.

All of these problems contribute to difficulty in a marriage.  You promise to love, honor and cherish when things are at their brightest and the future has all sunshine and rainbows, but stress, bills, worry, and problems are unrelenting.  You are constantly afraid that the delicate balance you’ve constructed will get tipped again with an emergency. You are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Damn, it’s really hard.

The mom in this tragedy blogged about her struggles with PTSD, from dealing with her daughter’s medical issues.  She talked about her survivor’s guilt, knowing that another child died while her child lived.  I can personally attest to that guilt, and have blogged about it before in my piece, Dear Mom of My Daughter’s Kidney Donor.  It is a unique and exquisite combination of gratitude and guilt that parents of kids who have received organs from deceased donors share.

Now there are five dead bodies, six if you include the dog, in a murder-suicide. A family that seemed very public about their struggles, struggles that I share as the parent of a chronically ill kid.  And I feel so many emotions connected to it.  Anger at the futility of it, and anger for the donor family too.  Sadness, a bottomless sadness for the family.  Horrible unrelenting understanding at the dark side of the situation.   Gratitude for the love and support from my family and friends, because through all of the many years now I have never, ever felt alone.

Because the truth is, that while there’s not a lot place in this world for sick kids, there’s not much place in this world for their parents either.  It’s only through the personal connections you have and make that carry you through the hard times.  It’s knowing you’re never alone, that there’s always someone there to listen, laugh with, or help you problem solve.  It’s combating the feeling of isolation with the knowledge that there’s always someone there for you, and you are there in return for them.

Hug the ones you love today and thank them.

My deepest sympathies and condolences to those who knew and loved the Short family.

The National Suicide Prevention 24 Hour Hotline: 1-800-273-8255

 

Ripple Effect

Posted in communication, coping, Resilience, transplant, UncategorizedTagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Have you ever heard a story that just stays with you?  Something that hits at your core, that makes you think about it, and re-think about it, and connect to it, and share it.  Maybe you have stayed in the car a little longer in a driveway because you are listening to “Story Corps” on NPR.  Maybe it’s something you’ve read on facebook.  Sometimes, you don’t realize how much a person’s story means to you, in your own journey to understanding and recovery from a diagnosis or the diagnosis of your child.

This recently was brought to my attention when a woman asked to be my facebook friend.  I was pretty sure I didn’t know her, had never met her, but there were a lot of people I had met at the American Transplant Games, and many of the mutual friends she and I had in facebook were those same people I had only recently met in Cleveland.  So I decided to accept her friend request and see who she really was.

What I didn’t know is that I had been reading her blog posts for over seven years.

Her daughter, Lacey, had gone through two organ transplants, both a heart and a kidney.  The heart transplant happened when Lacey was a baby, and after many years of immuno suppression (which isn’t great on the kidneys) her kidneys gave out too.  Lacey’s brother donated his kidney to her.  I had read all about it on their CarePage.

CarePages are a medical blog where you can update your loved ones about your condition. There are other ones like it, the most popular being CaringBridge.   We had been blogging about Wendy’s illness from the first week that we were at Massachusetts General Hospital.  It was helpful because it kept everyone updated without having to tell the same story over and over again.  It also was therapeutic for me to take stock of the day in the evening and determine what had gone well and what hadn’t.  In a hospital where certain events happens quickly between long periods of waiting, it was helpful to think through every day to process it all and write about it for our loved ones.   It was also bolstering because our loved ones could write messages of support for us and for Wendy at the bottom of every post, carrying us through to the next day.  There was an option to keep it private, to have people ask to join the group, and initially that’s what we did, kept it closed for only family and friends.

At the point where we were told that Wendy was going to need a kidney transplant, we had never met anyone who had gone through organ transplantation before, so I searched in Carepages and found Lacey Wood’s site.  It’s called LuckyLacey, and it told not only all about her journey as a heart transplant patient, but also as a kidney transplant patient.  It told all about her competitions in the American Transplant Games and the World Transplant Games.  It talked about her college that has a special section for kids with transplants who are going through various stages of transplantation so that they can get the best care they need while still going to college.  I learned so much from this site, that there was a warm, caring transplant community that connected each other to the best care and resources, that there was a celebration of life and living.

At a time when I was very scared, this blog especially gave me hope.

It also showed me what was possible for Wendy.  We never would have known about the American Transplant Games, or the Transplant Winter Camp, or the Chronic Illness Initiative at DePaul University.  We learned though Lacey’s journey and through the generosity of her words in her Carepages blog.

Her blog made me re-think our blog, WildWonderfulWendy.  What if our blog about HUS and kidney transplantation helped someone else the way that LuckyLacey helped us?  Michael and I talked about it and decided to make Wendy’s blog public.  

And now, years later, I’ve started this blog.  I outlined why I decided to write it in the first place in my first post, Brave Fragile Warriors.  I realized that being the parent of a chronically ill kid can be incredibly isolating.  You have so many feelings and not a lot of people who can relate to you.

We never know what impact we have on another’s life.  We don’t know what our ripple effect is.

When Lacey’s  mother contacted me to be my friend on facebook and I realized who she was, I sat down and wrote to her to let her know how much Lacey’s blog helped me through the fear and isolation of being the mom of a kidney transplant kid.  Otherwise she never would have known her own ripple effect.

It’s so important to share these moments, so other parents know they are not alone.  It’s equally important to share with others how much their stories touch our hearts, so that they may continue to write.  We are many stories, but the Same feelings of helplessness, fear and love.

Thanks for reading my stories. Please share your own, in the comments below or with your own blog and then let me know so I can read them.

Forward together is better than forward alone.

What If I Don’t Know the Answer?

Posted in Advocacy, communication, Compassion, Education, Family, UncategorizedTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

For a number of years now,  I have had  the honor of speaking to the brand new residents at our hospital.  These are often young doctors who likely graduated from Medical School, top of their class, in May.  I speak to them sometime in the third week of June, giving them enough time to pack all their worldly goods and travel to their placement between graduation and new residency.  They begin seeing patients sometime around July 1st.

A large proportion of these doctors do not have children of their own.  So they are experts on the anatomy and physiology of a child, but not necessarily experts on how to talk to them, or how to talk to their parents.

I get to speak to them on their first full day.   It says a lot about the administration of Massachusetts General Hospital for Children, that on the first day of the new residency, these new doctors speak to parents.  It sets the tone that the hospital is committed to family centered care.  It means that they are serious about good communication between doctors, patients and parents.

Every year, a few of the parents from the Family Advisory Council go together to this rather informal discussion.  We all introduce ourselves by way of our child’s illness.  We are what is known as “frequent fliers” in the hospital world, or kids  who are often in the hospital.

On this day, the first day of residency, we talk about bedside rounding.  As its name implies, bedside rounding occurs around the child’s hospital bed.  Everyone comes in and has the discussion together:  doctors, the child’s nurse, a pharmacist and the family.  The lead resident gives an introduction about the child and and her illness, and then discusses what they have done and what they need to do before discharge can happen. They will often discuss specific lab and test results.  Then they make a plan for the day, ask if there are any questions, and then move on to the next kid.

But it is a very different experience when doctors are talking among themselves and when they are talking to families.  Families haven’t gone to medical school, they don’t know the lingo.  They don’t know that afebrile means that the child doesn’t have a temperature.  They don’t know that emesis is vomiting. They don’t know what the thousands of maddening acronyms mean.  So the residents, who have spent all of this time learning all of these official terms, need to rethink the way that they report when the family is there.

The new doctors also have to deal with the fact that the parents, normally the ones who are in charge of every action and detail of their child’s life, are feeling helpless and scared.  That the child in the bed is also feeling that way, along with being in pain or discomfort.  The terms of the situation make matters worse.  No one is at their party best, so to speak.  Parents deal with this in different ways. Some parents don’t want to know anything technical, they just want the doctors to fix it as soon as possible so they can leave. Some parents want to know everything, down to every acronym and decimal point, so they can figure out what is going on.   Sometimes parents are hostile or sharp with the doctors as a defense mechanism.  Sometimes they burst into tears.  You never know what you’re going to get.

The temptation is to race through the bedside rounding, to cut corners, or to not answer all of the questions that the families have.  After all, these doctors are in charge of multiple children, multiple illnesses, hundreds of balls in the air on any given day.

We, the parents, are there to say that bedside rounding is important, even when it’s uncomfortable, sometimes especially when it’s uncomfortable.  We are a team, all of us, and we all need to be on the same page.

A team relies on trust.

Which brings me to my favorite question, that is asked every year:

“What if I don’t know the answer?”

These new doctors are used to knowing all the answers.  They are used to being the smartest person in any given room. They have encyclopedic memories.  They have been tested and they have been victorious.  But what happens if, for some reason, they are caught off guard and don’t know what the answer is to a question that a parent or a patient asks?

They are afraid that they will look like a fraud.

But who in the world knows all the answers anyway?  That’s not why they are there.  They are there to find the answers. They might not know them all.  And if a team is built upon the mutual trust of the participants, it is up to the doctor to say, “I don’t know the answer to that, but I will find out and get back to you.”  And the key is to follow through and do that.  They will win the respect of the family if they make that combination of confession and commitment to the truth.

It’s important to say one more thing, and we as parents say this every year too.  When we are all together in the hospital room, we are modelling behavior for our children. We are showing our chronically ill children, who will one day grow up and have to speak to doctors all on their own, how to be empowered to do so.  We are showing them that trust in medicine is important, that integrity is important, that bonds form when everyone is present in the discussion.

It is important to parents of chronically ill children to address the issue, try to fix it, with honesty and integrity, and to model this behavior for our children.  If you think about it, that’s the way life should go, but especially within the confines of a vulnerable situation like a hospital room.  Everyone needs to feel heard, everyone needs to feel respected, and great things can happen.

 

 

 

 

Dear Doctor S—-

Posted in Advocacy, communication, Compassion, Resilience, UncategorizedTagged , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Dear Doctor S—-

I want to thank you.  Really.   Even though you gave us bad news, I want to thank you for your approach, courtesy, and helpfulness.

Truthfully, we don’t know you well.  Wendy goes to see you once a year, to get new glasses.  We were just there a few months ago.  But in the last month or so, she was having a hard time seeing again, and I thought maybe it was growth or puberty or whatever, and I took her back to you.  I had Penny in tow as it was school vacation week.

You remembered all of us and asked us each questions about work, school, sports, and our town.  You spoke about people we knew in common.  You were ok with Penny playing on the floor of the room while you conducted your exam.  You don’t know how much I appreciated that, most of the time doctors find the extra child to be tiresome at best and a nuisance at worst.  You totally went with the flow of our chaotic life.

You examined Wendy and realized that it wasn’t really her vision that was off, that her prescription didn’t need to change that much, so you looked for more problems.  It turned out that Wendy was seeing double.  You examined her and you asked her good questions.  She had a hard time explaining some things, and you encouraged her by telling her that you know these things are hard to explain, but she was doing a good job and she should keep going and he would ask questions for clarification.  Doctors don’t do this often enough, not only did you engage Wendy, but you encouraged her, and when she didn’t have the right words, you asked thoughtful, non-threatening questions to help her.  Then you let her and Penny go out to pick glasses.

And this is a small thing, but I need to mention it.  Your staff was totally fine with both girls trying on as many glasses as they wanted to, and Penny didn’t even need them.  They let them try on a hundred glasses, or what seemed like it.  They were patient when the girls wanted to try on the crazy cat eye glasses or the pointy square glasses.  Eventually they narrowed Wendy down to five pairs, then three, then two, but they let the girls explore and have fun in the process of finding just the right pair.  No one judged them, no one told them no, no one worried they were going to break something (except perhaps me.)

While the girls tried on their fashion accessories, you told me about your concerns.  Based upon Wendy’s medical history, her medications, and her symptoms,  that I should speak to her specialists immediately, and that I should contact her pediatrician and make an appointment. You answered all my questions.  You continued that I should ask about a neurology consult and that this likely will lead to more tests.  All of these things you did firmly but not in a way to try to scare me.  You just let me know that something was wrong, it was serious, and we needed to look into it.  Then, and this is important, you helped me by telling me EXACTLY how to look into it.

I’ve been doing this a long time now doctor, almost nine years.  I pretty much consider myself a professional hospital parent, and I have to tell you that you did everything right.  Your exam was thorough, you were ok with the extra kid, you validated Wendy and her explanations, you explained your concerns to me, and you helped show me the way to the next step.

I don’t know what the outcome will be, this is a new needle in the haystack of Wendy’s medical conditions, but I want to tell you how much I appreciated our encounter yesterday.

Yours truly,

Darcy Daniels

Sometimes You’re Not Ready

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Sometimes you’re not ready to hear the bad news.

Bad news:  the news the doctors need to tell you, the diagnosis, the prognosis, the estimations, the best guesses.  Sometimes, even if you want to be, emotionally you’re just not there yet.

When Wendy was struck with her initial illness,  the doctors didn’t have a lot of positive things to say.  She was incredibly sick, and if she survived, there would be a lot of lingering health problems to contend with.  I could tell just by the looks on their faces during morning rounds that things were not going well.  Many years later, the division chair of Infectious Disease told me, “I dreaded coming into your room every day, because I never had any good news for you.”

They did their best to deliver the bad news to us slowly, and sometimes we were receptive to it, and sometimes we weren’t.  It is hard to hear from anyone that your world has been completely altered and some doctors are better at delivering bad news than others.

I remember one of the first doctors who came in to deliver bad news.  It turns out that Wendy’s pancreas was pretty much destroyed, making her an insulin dependent diabetic.  Unfortunately, that is  how the doctor opened the conversation, over Wendy’s hospital bed, in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.  She looked at me and said, “Don’t worry, some day in the future Wendy will come to you and want a cupcake, and you’ll know that it’s so many carbs, and you’ll give her the insulin.”

And I remember thinking,  in that moment, that she was absolutely crazy.  I would never, NEVER, be that ok with giving my daughter insulin.  I thought that she might as well be telling me that I’d never notice that hook she now has for a hand and she will eventually learn how to tie her shoe. (Just an example, Wendy’s hands are fine.)  I remember thinking that it was all too overwhelming to bear.  Blood sugar checks eight times a day?  Shots?  Carb counting?  Seriously, What the Hell?  How could this doctor be so callous in her delivery?  Didn’t she have a heart?

A few years later, when Wendy was in kindergarten, a student brought in cupcakes, and the nurse called me.  I approved the cupcake, instructed the nurse to give her insulin for sixty carbs, and hung up the phone, no problem.

Instantly I remembered that day in the hospital.

Damn. That doctor was right.  I just wasn’t ready to hear it.

While Wendy was initially in the hospital, other days were harder.  The day the doctors took us into the conference room to break the bad news about Wendy’s long term condition.  The charts we had to look at, the medicines we would be expected to give.  I remember crying so much that there was no point in trying to stop the tears with a tissue, they just silently ran down my face.  The doctors looked at me with pity and said, “We can do this another time,”  and I replied, “I’ll cry like this then too, let’s just get it over with.”

I later learned that the doctors call that particular conference room the “Room of Doom.”

Then the  the doctors told us that Wendy would need a kidney transplant.  Almost every doctor in the practice told us at different times.  The first doctor told me early on, in the parking lot, in passing.  I hoped he was joking.  Two others told us while Wendy was in the hospital.  One told us in the outpatient clinic.  It wasn’t a sit down intervention style of news breaking like in the “room of doom”, it was just giving an idea of what was coming up in the near future. No tears those times, because the news seemed so abstract.

I remember meeting with another mom whose daughter had a kidney transplant, who told me that I’d likely have to quit my job permanently to take care of all of the details of Wendy’s illness, and the tears came back in a flash. Nothing was going to be the same again.  There was no pretending that it would be like it used to be, I was the mom of a chronically ill kid and all the rules had changed.  It’s fear of the unknown combined with the crushing knowledge of what you ALREADY know that makes it so hard to bear.

Sometimes the messenger IS the problem, like the doctor who tells you bad news like ripping off a band-aid.  It stings and you wonder if they couldn’t have been just a tiny bit more gentle. An ophthalmologist once  told me that it didn’t matter how well we controlled Wendy’s blood sugar, that she would probably go blind eventually anyway.  That could have been more tactful. I still wonder why she said it that way. Some people don’t think about the consequences of their words on a patient or her parents.

Even if the doctors do the best they can to tell you, even if they explain it clearly, even if what they says makes sense.  Sometimes you’re just not ready.

But you will be.

With time. With Healing.  With understanding.  With education.    With support.  With love.

Be gentle with yourself and this journey.

You will be ready to hear the bad news, and move forward.