KK: Tell us about the dynamic and intricacies of a two-physician marriage.

TB: To me, the big advantage is that Noreen understands that I’m in a 24-7-365 business and that sometimes when I come home, I’m a grumpy old bastard, and sometimes when I come home, it’s been a really good day. Most of the days are in between.

KK: It has to be very helpful for somebody to have a fundamental understanding of what the environment is like and what the practice is like.

NO: It also started while we were in medical school. He understood when I felt like I had to study. And he could understand the stresses but also share in the joys.

KK: What are some of the challenges or obstacles of being together as a two-physician team?

TB: A challenge is the opposite side of an opportunity. Just going along chronologically, our oldest [our daughter] was born while we were in Michigan. Having children created some scheduling challenges. The department would have these Saturday morning meetings. Well, we both had to be there, so we’d bring her along. People looked at us funny because you didn’t do that in those days. But we hadn’t seen her all week, so she’s coming with us anyway.

A lot of things just happened to work out if you were willing to get a little bit of grace back and forth. I still send Noreen my proposed schedule, and she gets to veto anything that she wants.

We tried for a while for each of us maintain our own calendars, and you can guess how that worked out. So she’s in charge of the calendar.

NO: And sometimes if I didn’t write it down or I made a mistake on the calendar, we would get a call an hour or half hour after the shift was supposed to have started, “Tom, where are ya?”

TB: In 35 years of doing that, that’s only happened twice.

KK: Noreen, tell us about some challenges from your perspective.

NO: I don’t type that well, so when I can’t dictate because of the structure of the electronic medical record [EMR], I spend a lot more time doing pajama time at home, charting on my patients. He doesn’t have that luxury [to delay charting] in the ED the same way I do. Sometimes, he’s aggravated about it, but he’s more often my champion. We share frustrations about EMRs.