The Quiet Place & Co-Survivorship

Listen to the 43cc podcast episode with Kristin Flanary on Apple podcasts or find links to other platforms here.

No one has on their bingo card, ‘Co-survive your spouse’s three life threatening events before they’re 35.’ Yet, Kristin Flanary, also known as Lady Glaucomflecken, did just that.

Today, she advocates for what she has labeled, the co-survivor experience: “what a spouse, partner, parent, sibling, child, or friend goes through when their loved one endures a health crisis.”^[1] After her husband, Will’s (aka, Dr. Glaucomflecken), two bouts of cancer and a cardiac arrest, Kristin was plunged into “The Quiet Place.”^[2]

The Quiet Place contained the grief and distress of Kristin’s experience, devoid of language. Words “. . . flowed in and back out like a silent River Styx running through my brain.” Kristin had a psychology and communications background, but she suddenly struggled to express her experience of living through and responding to her husband’s cardiac arrest. Later she realized she was experiencing dissociative PTSD, her brain shutting down to protect her, but in the moment, she felt simply alone.

Dissociation is the disconnection between “thoughts, feelings, behaviors, sensations, and other mental processes that would normally be connected.”^[3] It is a survival instinct, which creates psychological distance from a traumatic situation to help you cope.

When words regained meaning and traction, Kristin read an article in Resuscitation about the “forgotten patient,” the partner or caregiver who is often overlooked after a traumatic medical event.^[4] That article kickstarted her work as an advocate, using her own experience of co-survivorship to raise awareness and educate others.

Medicine’s spotlight is trained, appropriately, on the identified patient. The loved ones who witnessed the crisis from the spill of the spotlight are routinely overlooked in the celebration of survival. Most healthcare systems lack resources to help patients, co-survivors, or families to psychologically process a traumatic medical event, so they don’t ask co-survivors how they’re doing. And, as a family member struggling to hold everything together, asking for help feels impossible.

When a care team asks their patient “do you have family at home who can help you?” they rarely consider how caregiving, which comes with emotional, physical, financial, and psychological burdens, will impact those providing support. Those family members may be balancing jobs, parenting responsibilities, financial pressures, and their own health concerns, all while trying to support someone they love, and manage unacknowledged grief, fear, and trauma.

Kristin’s advocacy expands our understanding of who needs care after a medical crisis. Survival is not a singular experience. Every diagnosis, hospitalization, surgery, or resuscitation creates lasting effects that extend far beyond the patient. There is often someone sitting in the waiting room, sleeping lightly beside a hospital bed, learning how to perform medical tasks at home, or carrying the memory of the worst day of their life long after everyone else has moved on.

Healing does not end with the patient. If we want truly compassionate healthcare, we must also care for co-survivors.

^[1] Kristin Flanary, “Who Is Lady Glaucomflecken?,” The Glaucomfleckens, accessed June 18, 2026, https://glaucomflecken.com/about/lady-glaucomflecken/.

^[2] Kristin Flanary, “The Quiet Place,” Journal of Cardiac Failure 27, no. 11 (2021): 1300–1301, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cardfail.2021.10.002.

^[3] Sarah M. Boyer, Jennifer E. Caplan, and Lisa K. Edwards, “Trauma-Related Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: Neglected Symptoms with Severe Public Health Consequences,” Delaware Journal of Public Health 8, no. 2 (2022): 78–84, https://doi.org/10.32481/djph.2022.05.010.

^[4] Kate Haywood and Karen N. Dainty, “Life After Cardiac Arrest: The Importance of Engaging with the ‘Forgotten Patient,’” Resuscitation 128 (2018): A1–A2, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resuscitation.2018.04.034.