Balance Each Other Out

DIANE: You speak up though. You always ask questions when you have to. I don't know if all Dads would do that, but you do. You let them know that you have a concern.

DIANE: Bill has a much more assertive style than I do. I think we balance each other out. I have a tendency, or I did in the beginning to be very passive. I'm not so passive any more. And I think Bill is maybe a little bit aggressive at times. So between us, I guess we get the assertiveness in there, but I think we are a good team.
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I think we've learned a long the way, and I think by the time you're in the hospital for your third surgery, they know you're not a green parent any more. And they do give you a little more room, a little more space, a little more leeway than they did the first time around.

BILL: They do treat veteran parents differently than first-time parents. There is a lot more space given. There's just assumptions that we know this, I guess, just from having been there.

INTERVIEWER: Does the staff welcome you as part of the team, or do they just sort of tolerate you? What sort of a level of acceptance?

BILL: I always equate everything to sports, but it's like going back to a team that you bet on. I feel like you're part of the whole process. I think we're part of the whole process.

DIANE: I felt tolerated in the beginning. Now I feel part of the team, more a part of the team. There's still things where I don't feel part of the team, like when they do rounds outside the door and you're sitting inside the room and they're whispering, I don't feel part of the team. But I definitely feel like they include us in decisions and care plans, and this is what's coming next.

We've developed a real ability to ask questions and just because our knowledge base has increased, we know the right questions to ask. I don't think in the beginning we really knew what to ask. We were concentrating on what does that machine mean, what's that beeping noise, what's tube -- now we know all that. So the questions we ask are more, "He seems extra irritable right now. Do you think he could have a pleural effusion (a pocket of fluid around the lung). We know what those symptoms could mean so we're able to ask more intelligent questions.

BILL: The nurses and the doctors know that in the first surgery, every time something would beep, the nurses would be careful and say, "It's okay," and would come running over right away. I think by the second and particularly by the third surgery, we would be the ones shutting the machine off and saying, "It's just a loose connection, his respirations are fine. So in that sense we were part of the team.

My wife has a reputation for knowing a lot. She actually stumped one of the surgeons before this last surgery. She asked a question about a procedure and the surgeon, I'll never forget it, about a technique for the surgery. The surgeon actually looked at her and said, "I really don't know what you're talking about."

DIANE: That was the surgical fellow, and I did not mean to put him on the spot that way. But I had read an article that talked about a different technique they could use, and would they do that. He had no idea what I was talking about.