When Waiting Time Gets Personal

Now it was my turn.

Eventually, everyone gets to be a patient or the family member of a patient. When you are a Press Ganey employee, you go into the experience with a combination of increased knowledge and awareness of the amazing things that health care heroes do every day and the things that may not go as expected.

My husband Bill was scheduled to have a three- to three-and-a-half-hour hand surgery to correct an inherited condition of middle-aged men of Northern European descent called Dupuytren’s Contracture. Everything went like clockwork the morning of surgery. Attentive front-desk staff. Check. Attentive, efficient nurses in pre-op. Check. The anesthesiologist came by, then the surgeon… good to go.

After two hours, the surgeon came out to personally update me that my husband was fine but that the surgery was going to take much longer than originally planned due to the extensive disease and scar tissue in Bill’s hand. He said it was one of the worst cases he had ever seen, and this talented surgeon, Paul R. Ellis III, MD, does the most Dupuytren’s surgery in Dallas.

So I continued to wait patiently (not my normal condition), and then an hour later I got a call from the OR circulating nurse on my personal cell phone, who said “your husband is fine but the doctor is going to have to do the skin graft he had told you he might have to do, and that may add another hour to the case.”

A couple hours later I received yet another call, this one from the circulating nurse. “I just want to update you that your husband’s doing well. We had to take the tourniquet off again, so the doctor wanted me to touch base and tell you all is well.”

Finally, after five and a half hours in surgery, the surgeon emerged with the good news that Bill did great, was in recovery and he could expect greatly improved quality of life. His fingers would be more functional again.

During the entire process, it was so hard to take the “Press Ganey evidence-based best practice standards” out of this girl. But I was thrilled and relieved when the hospital’s employees kept me “informed about delays.” (They had no idea I worked for Press Ganey.)

I will never think of that question again when assisting a client without being reminded of how much it meant to me personally that day in November 2011 to be kept “informed about delays.” It made all the difference. Baylor University Medical Center “AM Admits” Outpatient Surgery Department “gets it.” Thank you.