#415: The Silent Crisis of Co-Survivors in Healthcare with Kristin Flanary

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Dr. Brad Block interviews Kristin Flanary about her experiences as a co-survivor, focusing on the challenges caregivers face during medical emergencies. Kristin shares her journey of supporting her husband through two testicular cancer diagnoses and a cardiac arrest in 2020. She emphasizes the need for healthcare providers to better recognize and support co-survivors.

Kristin talks about the emotional impact of these experiences, including the trauma of performing CPR on her husband. She urges medical professionals to improve communication with families and involve them more in the care process. She also advocates for changes like providing social workers, chaplains, or support groups to help families during and after crises.

Kristin also emphasized the importance of addressing the mental health needs of co-survivors, as many struggle with recovery on their own. She encouraged healthcare providers to show empathy and build stronger connections with both patients and their families.

 

 BIO

After her husband suffered a sudden cardiac arrest, Kristin Flanary, also known as Lady Glockenflecken, became a prominent advocate for trauma, resilience, and co-survivorship. Drawing from her personal experiences, Kristin has focused on raising awareness about the challenges faced by caregivers and co-survivors during medical crises. With a master’s degree in experimental psychology, she leverages her expertise to advocate for greater recognition and support for caregivers and families impacted by their loved ones’ health challenges. Her efforts emphasize addressing the often-overlooked emotional and mental health needs of these individuals while promoting resources like HeartSite and CASA (Cardiac Arrest Survivor Alliance) to provide practical guidance and community support.

Kristin and her husband co-host the medical comedy podcast Knock, Knock, High with the Glockenfleckens and are currently touring a live stage show titled Wife and Death, which is based on their life experiences.

website:
https://casahearts.org/

https://ourheartsight.com/

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome back to the podcast on today's episode. Super special guest. I know I say that every time, but I really mean it this time. We've got Christian Flannery, otherwise known as Lady Glockenflecken. . She's a podcaster, speaker, writer, and advocate on the topics of trauma, resilience, and co survivorship after saving her husband from sudden cardiac arrest.

(00:01):
So that's fun. Lubbock, Texas. I remember you could smell the feedlots. That's what I remember. Did you grow up around there? Is that how you ended up at science camp there? It was like a research opportunity. You would spend the summer in high school writing a research paper on, it was on plant molecular biology, Arabidopsis thaliana.
And then here we are. Lots of overachievers in this crowd. So you and your husband have been very public with his health history. Just to go over it quickly. Testicular cancer in medical school and then another distinct testicular cancer in residency and then after residency, cardiac arrest in the middle of the night in May of 2020, like right as COVID was raging Now, clearly his doctors knew the medicine because he's doing well and we all benefit from him now because of his amazing skits and the amazing content you guys create out there.
Which, yes, I was but that is a distinct role from co patient or co survivor. A lot of people can be a caregiver with various, connections to the patient, and often a co survivor is also a caregiver and vice versa, but not always. And that paper described it, as there's really another patient in the room.
Because I was about to mansplain. Could you teach us like, How those things affected you? Yes the first cancer and I have to say, people always want to make it like an either or a me versus him, family member versus patient, it's not that at all, it can be both, it's both and.
Medical events that have happened. With the cancer, that was in our mid to late 20s. We had a 11 month old daughter. I had just graduated from grad school, and he was still in medical school. We were still very much in this really precarious place in life, really depending on student loans and just whatever, we were far away from family and none of our friends had children at that stage and we were trying to juggle and balance all these things and so that in and of itself was difficult to throw a medical event and a word like cancer on top of that, but it also was more of a psychological.
And that has an effect, and even though I knew it was treatable, there's always the, what ifs that happen, that you think about because yeah, it's still cancer and it's treatable, but that doesn't mean that everyone has the same outcome I remember thinking like. They talk about five year outcomes at 27 years old. I want to know. A hell of a lot longer than five years from now, so yes There's still a lot of uncertainty and a lot of questions and a lot of kind of mental grappling that you have to do with that word and that was the first one he had surgery.
Cuz this guy sure seems to like to grow cancer, yeah What's happening here? Now there's almost, beginnings of a pattern. Is that gonna continue to be a problem? I guess we're done having children biologically because there's no more testicles involved. We had to deal with that.
It's making these decisions. So Yes, that i'm sure he has a skit on that. So many insurance skits. They were all Born out of frustration from our real life Events and yes, that is definitely one of them. It's a recurring nightmare that we have had to deal with for Almost 10 years now and we'll have to deal with for the rest of his life.
I think though the communication It comes down to just be a human, Remember that they are humans and you are humans and just have a normal human interaction, right? Forget that you're in the hospital forget that you're wearing the white coat forget that you see this all the time Try to imagine if this was your you know, friend family member child, what have you?
Yeah, I think one strategy that I got from Gita Penza, who you've had on your show where she says in the emergency department, sometimes you'll have someone with a thought disorder, or you have someone with a substance use disorder and they've got it pretty rough and you might be the only person that's been nice to them all day.
This is not oncology, right? It's a little different. It's like throat clearing or something like that. just I have to put myself in that Remember, this was once someone's little baby, please treat them like their parents were in the room right now watching that, like they're having a tough time, and you're having a tough time, but try and remember this.
I would start with, look at me. Acknowledge that I'm in the room. Ask me if I have questions, both times with the cancer, I was a fly on the wall as far as they were concerned, it's here's the patient and they talk to the patient and as they should, but just don't forget that there's a second person in their room, and they're not there as an accessory.
So it's really just such a low bar. That's the good news is that to improve this issue. It's so easy because all you have to do is acknowledge that there's a person there and then be a person to them. That's it. That'd be 100 percent improvement. Especially considered what happened to you in the hospital while he was in the ICU.
I just think it's a systemic issue that we can all do better once we are aware of where the gaps are. When I went to the hospital, again, this was May of 2020, so everything was, up in the air and we weren't sure what was happening with COVID. There were all these protocols, but, everyone was still figuring out what the protocols were.
And they said, okay, we'll go ask whoever the supervisor was. And so they walked away for a little bit, and in that time I saw a paper on the door that had three things listed for three reasons that you would be allowed in. And one of them was if you were the partner, of a person birthing a child.
Oh, not the time, right? ~He's just ~you just got there. Holy cow but I took it and then they weren't real sure where to put me because ~you know ~Normally, you just go into the waiting room, I guess but with kovat everything was all weird. And so they put me into a Kind of an intermediary waiting area.
So it wasn't like the main waiting room, but it was ~like a waiting area, ~an intermediate waiting area. ~Yeah. ~The thing is, though, because it was in radiology, all the walls in that part of the hospital were lined with lead, and that cut off my cell phone signal. And no one thought about that, as if you didn't feel alone enough in that situation. Exactly. And I am having to be the point person for all of our family members and close friends who knew what was going on. We're very concerned and had questions. And, so I have this job to do in addition to just being emotionally distraught.
I was like in the hallway. I wanted to know if I wanted a chair so they're like trying to be nice, but they were also like really Looking at me like what are you doing? You're not supposed to be here And so then eventually the same receptionist that had let me in at first Came and said that I had to Leave because I was making people nervous.
It's not like I was Breaking a rule someone had given me. But yeah, it was insult to injury, right? And so then I couldn't even be in the building with him. After that I was not allowed back into the hospital. At that point, he had been in the emergency room, but
So at this point, my husband is still unconscious. He has a heartbeat, but he's unconscious. We don't know what has caused it. Everything is very much up in the air and he comes in and leads with the statistics and those are obviously very bad. 1 in 10 survive out of hospital cardiac arrest. And then, I was asking him questions and trying to understand, wrap my head around all of that and in that conversation he said, I would have liked it if you had seen him collapse because then we would know if CPR had been started immediately So what he was trying to say is I could give you a better estimate if I knew when the cardiac arrest had started relative to when CPR had started.
That was the logic flow in his mind. But, yeah, the way that it was said to me was like, yeah, you did this wrong. And I'm like, I'm sorry that I, was sound asleep in the middle of the night in my own bed. What was I supposed to do? Also, I think, in retrospect, ~that really, ~It stung in the moment, but then later on when I learned new things, it made me really angry because one of the things that I had been very clear about to the dispatcher, to the paramedics, to the physicians at the hospital, was that what had woken me up was that he was making very loud, strange, snoring like sounds, but they were very wrong, again, not a medicine, didn't know what those were, just knew something was wrong, learned later, those were agonal respirations, and when a cardiac arrest happens, those happen at the beginning.

(00:22):
And so what would you want? Physicians to know about a co survivor in this type of situation in particular how should we be addressing and helping? the co survivor Better. Yeah, I think the first thing to recognize is and I'll speak to cardiac arrest because that was my experience But you could extrapolate to other things too, right?
Yeah, give them some direction exactly And again, it comes back to just like feeling seen and understood Really, step one, ~that ~the physician doesn't need to be all things to all people, right? You are trained in a certain thing. I want you doing that thing. But you also know how the hospital works and you can connect people with the right people for them that do other things, right?
They are not in a state. The executive function is not there. It is not so easy to just pick up the phone and call a psychologist and make an appointment and show up, right? That's a whole process and it does also require a lot of like executive function and time a waiting list and all sorts of so many things need to happen before that to whom I recommend that type of thing to who are not having issues with executive function And it's a struggle like yeah, do they take my insurance?
So yeah, connecting them with resources. And I've actually been, again, this is specific to cardiac arrest, but it does have things that are relevant for other kinds of illnesses too. I've been involved in, there weren't any resources after I was home and everything, like I was googling for months and I was trying to find things and it took me forever to find anything that helped and so one of the things that has been my therapy for myself is being involved in creating those resources for people.
So it speaks to each of those roles and then CASA is a, community support, like peer support network for people that have been through cardiac arrest. And there's many other things out there for other kinds of illnesses, but with cardiac arrest, people just haven't survived until recently in history.
Google will show you. Thank you so much for your time and all you do for physicians and for co survivors. Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me on. You're welcome.