When Theresa Garnero was a girl she wanted to be a cartoonist. In fact, she received her first rejection slip — asure 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 DIABETease to help fill that void. 

“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. 

Diabetes 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.”