Theresa Garnero, APRN, BCADM, MSN, CDE, Diabetes Educator of the Year
“Diabetes is a serious disease but I wanted to do something innovative and colorful, and focus on the lighthearted
31st Annual Meeting & Exhibition American Association of Diabetes Educators August 11-14, 2004 • Indianap
Theresa Garnero Named Diabetes Educator of the YearWhen Theresa Garnero was a girl she wanted to be a cartoonist. In fact, she received her first rejection slip — a
sure sign of budding talent — from Walt Disney, himself, when
she was eight years old.
Today Garnero is combining that childhood dream with her grown-up career as a diabetes educator by helping
people find humor in diabetes. She’s a regular cartoon
contributor to periodicals, and last November published a
collection of 50 diabetes-related color cartoons in a book titled
DIABETease: A Lighter Look at the
Serious Subject of
Diabetes. Garnero was recognized Friday morning for her work when she received the AADE’s Diabetes Educator of
the Year Award, sponsored by
LifeScan, Inc.
Theresa Garnero,
APRN, BCADM, MSN, CDE, Diabetes
Educator of the Year
“Diabetes is a serious disease but I wanted to do something innovative and
colorful, and focus on the lighthearted
side,” said Garnero,
APRN, BCADM, MSN, CDE, who is president-elect of the new AADE California Central
Coast
Chapter. Garnero, who was also awarded the Allene Van Son Diabetes Educator
Award in the audiovisual educational
tools category at this meeting “for developing an original,
outstanding, and effective education tool,” said many
diabetes educators use humor in their work with patients and would like to use
more, but there are few resources
available to incorporate in their programs. She created
She said the book took her about a year of working late nights, weekends, and a few weeks of vacation time to finish.
“I drew all the cartoons with a pencil and a big eraser, and then scanned them into the computer and worked on
them in Photoshop,” said Garnero, estimating that it took eight
to 16 hours to finish each cartoon.
Since the book was self-published, it also took a significant financial investment on her part. Garnero hopes to
have recouped her investment in about a year. She’s already been
contacted about doing a Spanish version of the
book. Garnero’s plan from the start was to bury subliminal messages about
managing diabetes in her cartoons. Tips
garnered from the American Diabetes Association’s clinical practice guidelines are presented in a humorous manner,
covering aspects of care from diet to exercise and from foot
care to monitoring blood sugar.
But
DIABETease is by no means the first time Garnero’s work has seen print. She’s been published inDiabetes Interview, now called Diabetes Health, and she currently has a regular cartoon feature called “Islets of
Humor” on the Defeat Diabetes Foundation website
www.DefeatDiabetes.org.
“I have my sketchpad with me wherever I go,” said Garnero, who also serves as editor-in-chief of Nursing
Insight, a quarterly publication for the Community Hospital of
the Monterey Peninsula, California. Garnero said she
has seen the effect her cartoons can have on patients when “people would come
into my office after their diagnosis
and see the cartoons on the walls, and I could see their spirits lift.”
Diabetes Educator of the Year, Theresa
Garnero; finalists, Ginny Burns and Sharon Larkin.
Garnero is donating half the profits of
DIABETeas to diabetes research. One quarter of the profits will go to theJuvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and the other quarter
will go to various type 2 diabetes research
organizations. Diabetes resources and statistics are listed in the back of the
60-page book. Since publishing is print-
on-demand, she can update the data regularly.
The book is being sold at the AADE Bookstore and can also be ordered from the publisher or from Garnero at
877-765-4386 or www.tgarnero.com.
Theresa Garnero, APRN, BC-ADM, MSN, CDE, received the Diabetes
Educator of the Year Award at Friday,
August 13, 2004 General Session of AADE 31st Annual Meeting and Exhibition.
Source: AADE Daily News, August 11 - 14, 2004.
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