Catching up with Karyn

Do you know what really ticks me off? When people don’t take Lyme Disease seriously. This condition – which can be truly devastating – is often ignored or dismissed as even a possibility until the symptoms become debilitating. By that point, treatment is difficult and expensive – and often, not covered by insurance.

As a nurse, humorist, and professional speaker, I was really glad to see this story in the Santa Cruz Sentinel about Carol Fox – also a nurse – who has devoted her life to teaching people about Lyme Disease. Carol uses two powerful tools – humor and art – to present the facts about Lyme Disease to her community.

This is an effective approach for a number of reasons. People are overwhelmed by information today. We’re all wired up, connected to our smartphones and tablet computers every minute of the day. You can’t avoid being inundated by health attention. There are messages about blood pressure and cholesterol...

I work in a neurologist’s office. We try to get really complete histories from every new patient but the patient I was working with, Mr. K, hadn’t checked anything on his intake paperwork. No history of heart disease, no high blood pressure, no cancer scares – not a thing. That’s so rare among our patients (Average Age 78!) that I had to ask him about it.

“Medical history?” He shrugged. “Can’t say there’s much. Of course, I’ve had amnesia as long as I can remember.”

This little grin pushed up the corners of Mr. K’s mouth, and his eyes suddenly started twinkling. I burst out laughing, and so did he. It turns out he did have a little bit of medical history, and he shared that with me after our laugh.

I was dropping off the file when one of the other nurses stopped me. “What was going on in there?”

I shared Mr. K’s joke. “I hate it when they try to be funny,” she said, rolling her...

How many times, for example, have you had a patient report Level 14 Pain – when you can get them to take a break from the animated conversation they’re having on one phone and text-fest they’re having on another? That patient is almost inevitably followed by a seriously injured person who protests that they’re "Just fine – can I go home now?" Talking them into having at least a few stitches to keep their innards in the usual places is a job in and of itself.

Humor To Help Keep Perspective

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

Mel Brooks made a critical point with this quote. It’s far easier to find humor in the things that happen to other people than it is to laugh at our own circumstances. Humor experts caution us to keep that in mind, both when we want to laugh at someone else’s situation and when people laugh at ours. Anyone of us could slip into a Pool of Unspecified Origin while en...

"You either love working peds or you don’t work peds." I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this nursing 'wisdom.' There’s more than a grain of truth to it: generally, nurses who specialize in pediatrics tend to love their work passionately.

However, enjoying what you do doesn’t mean that you don’t have challenges on the job – and if you’ve never attempted to make a bed with one hand while holding a baby in the other and figuring out dosages by weight in your mind, you don’t know challenging! (And if you can master that, try finding scrubs that don’t show formula stains!)

Luckily, humor can help ease some of the challenges of pediatric nursing. Here are three ways humor helps make life with pediatric patients easier:

Humor Helps Make The Medical Environment Less Frightening For Our Patients

"Can you make my nose stop running?" Tyler looked up, wide-eyed. "Because I’m tired of boogers." The poor kid was...

Did you hear the one about…?  According to a recent study, one of every three U.S. nurses surveyed under age 30 plans to leave their jobs within the next year. One in five nurses plans to leave the profession within five years because of unsatisfactory working conditions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 450,000 additional registered nurses will be needed to fill the present demand.  Experts worry about the year 2020, when the registered nurse shortage is projected to reach 500,000 positions, coinciding with the increasing need for healthcare in an aging U.S. population.

It's obvious that the state of health care today is no joke. But it may be a laughing matter if one understands the premise that humor oftentimes is generated by painful circumstances. There is nothing funny about unlimited resources, job security, or a physician who responds quickly and cheerfully to a nurse’s request. The things that make nurses laugh tend to be the very things...

Thanks for asking. I was Vice-President of the JNJ during its eight year stint and best friends with publisher, Doug Fletcher. Doug had a great vision when he created the JNJ and left a tremendous legacy. His untimely death, and the deaths of our friends and colleagues Bob Diskin (Too Live Nurse), Georgia Moss, and Diane Rumsey, left a huge void in the world of healthcare humor. In Doug’s honor, AATH has named its Lifetime Achievement Award after Doug (see www.aath.org)

Below is an announcement I created when we ceased publication of the JNJ. Barely a day goes by that I don’t think of Doug and smile.

The Journal of Nursing Jocularity was a quarterly publication for nurses and health professionals that was written, edited, illustrated and published by nurses and health professionals. The first issue was Spring, 1991; the last issue was the Spring, 1998. Filled with satire, true stories, cartoons, and all around funny stuff related to nursing and health care – it...