Interview

Children’s Hospital of Michigan employs some of the most renounced pediatric nurses in our area. When faced with this interview for my research topic of twin studies I could not think of a better person to turn to than my co-worker and second cousin, Cathy Suda. Cathy has worked in the medical field for over twenty years. She is a licensed registered nurse and has worked in a variety of different settings from hospice care to pediatric care; she now embraces the title of Nursing Administrator, overseeing a vast majority of Children’s Hospital.
I started off the interview by asking whether she thought twin studies were a good investment and why. “From a medical standpoint the results that come from twin studies are very important they allow us as medical professionals to know the best way to treat our patients by looking through their family medical history. Generally a patient’s family history is only a starting point for a nurse or doctor, yet these results let us know which aspects of the history are likely to present within our own patient. This way we can weed through what is relevant and what is not” said Cathy.
Once I had established her own opinion on whether twin studies were worth the amount of time and effort that they have been receiving recently I moved to her own personal experiences with twins. I choose to do this in order to put a story with each of the topics I was trying to cover in order to give a good overview of these studies. Information pertaining to particular studies could be researched later.
My next question was what her experiences with twins had looked like. She stated that she has had both personal as well as profession experiences with sets of twins. She has encountered both identical and fraternal sets of twins within the realm of her career but her most extensive experience with a single set of twins was with a set of identicals. A statement that she had made following this answer was one that shocked me, she stated “Too many the type of twins that a set is an insignificant detail. A set of twins is a set of twins. Yet if you know anything about twins aside from the fact that they were born at the same time, this is a huge deal.” I could not have said it better myself. We talked for awhile about the different types of twins there are (mono/mono, mono/di, and di/di) and how different the different sets are from one another.
I asked specifically for stories of her different experiences. This way I could use her stories along with my knowledge of the academic side of twin studies to paint a clear picture in my reader’s minds. Her professional story was one that I personally would have expected to make the news or have been part of a novel with a medical plot. Due to HIPPA laws which maintain doctor patient confidentiality all names had to be let out as well as some details. Cathy had been stationed in the emergency department one morning upon arriving to work a twelve hour shift. There was a very young mother who had given birth to a set of twins at home. “From what I understood she had not wanted anyone to know she was pregnant, she was going to give the babies up after birth, so he had not taken herself into the hospital she thought she could do this on her own” Cathy said this with the tone a mother uses when telling her child that they should have known better than to do something that had just occurred. The babies were brought directly into our trauma room in the emergency department. They were stabilized and moved up to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). They had to be hooked up to numerous machines to keep them alive. Cathy ended up working twenty hours that day being assigned the twins’ nurse for the day, but it wasn’t only that that had kept her there. The twins’ had been in the NICU only a few hours before the younger twin coded, it was a code blue the newborn had gone into repertory failure. The nurses rushed to the newborns side and by the time they had reached one child the other was coding too. This had happened twice while the twins were staying at the hospital. Every time something happened to one of them it was only a matter of seconds before the other one was shows the exact same symptoms. Cathy seemed still in a bit of confusion as to how it all happened “I know that they were identical but it really makes you wonder about whether there really is a “twin connection” maybe I should go ask a twin” she said laughing.
She seemed so anxious to get the personal part of the interview and I already knew where it was headed. As I asked her about her personal experiences with twins she said that she was extremely lucky to have two god-granddaughters that were identical twins, she was in fact talking about my own daughters. It took a lot of effort to keep her on track at this point which was why I saved if for the end of our interview. My daughters are identical twins they are what is considered mono/di twins. Much of what she eluded to was how much she had expected them to be exactly the same, yet they are far from it. “I almost fainted the day you told me they were going to be twins I was so excited I couldn’t wait for them to get here. You always said that even in your belly they had different personalities and when they were born they looked so alike I couldn’t believe that they could act different because they were just so alike. Yet as they got older and grew into their personalities a little bit more they made it easier for me to tell them apart. Maddy is just like you, and well I hate to say it but Jess is a spinning image of Nick. Yet when you really think about it they are both very outgoing, talkative, and charismatic. I bet if you could give a toddler a personality test they would probably match up very closely. Yet to me their personalities’ seem like day and night.”
To end the interview my final question to her was, if she was able to set up a twin study that was fully funded that would its objective be? She stated that she would love to know more about twins both identical and fraternal that were raised apart in order to find out exactly what our DNA has planned out for us and what we can influence for ourselves.