By Vicki Prichard
NKyTribune reporter
There is no doubt that a sold-out crowd will turn out to watch Garren Colvin’s friends and colleagues present him with a good-natured roast at the Third Annual Northern Kentucky Tribune Celebration and Roast on Sept. 6 at the St. Elizabeth Educational and Training Center (formerly the METS Center).
It’s equally likely that they won’t want to miss the antics that Critical-Care Nurse Specialist, and the evening’s emcee, Terry Foster, might have in store for the St. Elizabeth Medical Center CEO.
“I asked Garren to give me some guidelines, and he said, ‘Bring it, dish it out; all I ask is that you remember that my parents are there,’” Is that not a fair thing to say?” says Foster.
Getting off his bum and into a career
Nursing presented itself as a career option to Foster on a ‘lazy’ summer day.
“My mom worked in the admitting office of the hospital at night and she said, ‘I don’t want your lazy ass lying around all summer. You need to do something,’” says Foster.
Those gentle words of inspiration spurred the then 14-year-old Foster to enroll in a Red Cross volunteer class and later volunteer at St. Elizabeth, where his mother worked.
“One of the people who oriented me was a guy who was a nurse,” says Foster. “I thought I wanted to go into medicine as a physician. I had no idea a guy could be a nurse. I thought that was kind of interesting and didn’t think anything more of it until I saw what he did, and I liked his direct contact with patients.”
Foster applied to LPN school at what was then Booth Hospital in Covington.
“I was turned down the first time I applied. They said my cumulative records were not supportive,” says Foster, whose high school career aptitude test suggested that he was suited to own a pet shop.
“I said, ‘I don’t think that’s what I want to do.’”
The counselor arranged for an opportunity for him to volunteer at a local pet store.
“All you do as a volunteer is clean up cages, if you get my drift,” says Foster. “I was like, ‘I ain’t touching those damn snakes or the tarantulas. I think there’s something else for me.’”
And he was right. There was something else for him.
In 1976, Foster once again applied, and was accepted, to LPN school at Booth Hospital. He was hired as a ward clerk at St. Elizabeth, working nights and attending school during the day. When he graduated a year later, he began working in the emergency room at Mercy Hospital in Cincinnati. Today, he is the Critical-Care Clinical Nurse Specialist in the six Emergency Departments at St. E’s, and he is an Ambassador for the St. Elizabeth Foundayion.
“I just knew I really liked it, and liked taking caring of the patients – what I call the drunks, the fights, the wrecks, and the drug abusers, and those are just the nurses you work with.”
Clinical comedy
There was no denying that the emergency room was a fertile ground for Foster’s sense of humor.
“I think it developed as a necessity,” says Foster. “When I would be working in the ER, or as a clerk, or a new nurse, I would hear people tell stories, and I thought there was such a learning component to it because usually a story has a twist or a turn, and I always thought I learned a lot from them. A nurse would say, ‘Oh, I’ll never forget the time…’ and I saw that as a learning part.
Eventually, Foster, who also earned his Registered Nurse (RN) degree from Christ Hospital and his Master of Science degree in Critical-Care and Trauma Nursing from the University of Cincinnati College of Nursing and Health, came to teach nursing as well.
“When I started doing a little bit of teaching, I thought, ‘I’m going to incorporate those stories,’” says Foster. “I teach things like trauma, advanced cardiac life support, arterial blood gas interpretation, and those are kind of dry topics. I always throw in stories – clinical stories that begin with, ‘I’ll never forget this patient.’ It makes it interesting and more applicable.”
Foster has authored more than 40 professional publications in various textbooks, nursing, and healthcare journals, and has lectured at nursing seminars and conferences throughout all 50 states. But more often than not, he’s asked to tell his stories – the funny ones.
“When people say, ‘We want you to come talk about humor at this nursing conference,’ I say, ‘Okay, I can do something on shock or trauma,’ and they say, ‘NO, we just want that funny crap you do.’ There’s a compliment in there somewhere. I want to say, “But I’m a really good nurse. I’m not just cracking jokes while working on a code.”
But when he is cracking jokes, he’s at the top of his game, and it’s not without purpose. And there’s a reason conferences are calling on him to present a bit of levity in the profession.
Foster explains that an ER team will witness a sad and daunting side of society.
“We see people that their family doesn’t want them, the nursing home doesn’t want them, their doctor doesn’t want to take care of them,” he says. “We see people that even the police don’t want and the jail won’t take. They’re disowned from their family or they have no one. I’ve taken care of a lot of people in my life who say, ‘I have no one.’ It just breaks your heart, and I’m like ‘I’ll be your friend.’ I think that’s very sad.”
A bit of humor strikes a necessary balance.
“You need balance; and it’s a way to deal with the stress,” says Foster. “I do think that’s how a lot of people deal with it, because there is a problem in health care with chemical dependency and burnout.”
Sierra Leone, Kentucky
Foster has a few rules of humor: no making fun of race, religion, preference, or station in life. He doesn’t make fun of people, instead, he says, some of the situations are funny. And sometimes those situations come at just the right time, like in the midst of flu season and packed-house ER. Case in point, Sierra Leone, Kentucky.
“It was when Ebola was really crazy, about three years ago. We had all this training and we had to ask patients, ‘In the past three months, have you been to Liberia, Guinea, or Sierra Leone?” says Foster. “One Friday night, at the high of Ebola – it’s flu season and everybody’s sick and we have every bed in the ER filled, the hallway beds, stretchers, chair, the walking wounded, and in the lobby there’s like 40 patients waiting for triage – I had a lady who was in her late 70s in the triage chair and I said, “Ma’am, in the past three months have you been to Liberia, Guinea, or Sierra Leone?” And she looked at me and said, “Now ain’t that last one down in Bracken County?” I said, “Okay, you answered the question, thank you.” And she looks at her husband and said, “Didn’t we drive through there going to Mary Gladys’s funeral?”
Foster says many of the situations he witnesses remind him of Art Linkletter’s “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” or Paul Dixon and Ruth Lyons’ model — humor in the everyday things that people do and say.
“I’ve asked females in the ER who are of childbearing age if there is a possibility that they might be pregnant, because we can’t x-ray or give them medicine until we clarify that. Sometimes I’ll say, ‘Are you sexually active?’ and they say, ‘No, I’m married.’”
Ready for his close-up
When Foster isn’t in the ER or teaching a team of young nurses, you can catch him and his ER adventures on The Learning Channel’s (TLC) “Untold Stories of the ER.” He is the first RN to ever be featured on the physician-only based television show. He says that when the producers initially reached out to him, he was convinced it was a prank.
“I do a class called The Bizarre and the Spectacular, Unique Cases in the ER, that was a hit,” says Foster. “I was going to do the talk in Seattle and one of the show’s producers called me at work and wanted to know if they could come and hear the talk and maybe use me on the show. I said, ‘Who is this?’”
On high alert for paybacks, Foster was convinced that some of his buddies were executing well-earned revenge for pranks he’d pulled on them. He told the producer he’d have to call her back and waited until he was home to return the call. It was the real deal.
The producers flew to Seattle, saw the presentation, but told Foster that as much as they liked his talk they wouldn’t be able to use him because they only use doctors on the show. He pointed out that none of his professional information implied that he was a doctor. He asked why they only featured doctors on their show and they told him it was “because doctors know more about what goes on in the ER and they tell the nurses what to do.”
“I said, ‘Do you have time for a drink,’” says Foster.
Once he’d explained the actual role of an ER nurse, the enlightened producers were ready to sign him. He is the first nurse ever featured on “Untold Stories of the ER.”
Once a year, Foster flies to Vancouver to tape an episode inspired by a real-life event. He pitches one or two stories to them via conference call, they make a selection and then he shares the full story with them on Skype. Early on, there was still a bit of a learning curve for the producers.
“In the first scene, the patient was going to be discharged from the ER. The doctor goes in and gets the patient up, gets them dressed, and wheels them out to the car, and I’m like, ‘Oh, hell no. that does not happen,’” says Foster. “I don’t want my doctor wheeling a patient out to the parking lot, that’s not the best use of his time. I can get a tech or an assistant. So there’s been some of that give and take.”
There will be a bit of give and take at the Northern Kentucky Tribune Celebration and Roast of Garren Colvin too – between Foster and Cathy “Chick” Halloran, a women’s product specialist at St. Elizabeth Medical Center, and founder and president of Chicks and Chucks, Inc., a non-profit support group for breast cancer patients. Foster says the two will “bounce” a bit of comedy off each other, good-naturedly at Colvin’s expense.
Bob Hoffer, David Armstrong, Trey Grayson and Brent Cooper are among the conspirators who will join Foster on stage.