The Morrlsville and Preston Progress, Wednesday, March 27,1996 -5
Preston resident dispenses humor to ease life’s load
By Ron Page
Move over, Charles Kuralt.
Preston’s Jimmie Butts will soon
be "On the Road Again."
Most people who spend 39 years
in a job often fantasize of the more
serene aspects of life...like taking
long trips to places they’ve never
seen before, a cruise to an exotic is
land or a trip into the wilderness,
even a simple walk on the beach.
Jimmie Butts does all those
things. But if you think it’s fanta
sizing, think again. For 12 of the
first 17 months after retiring fron
SAS Institute’s health-care center
in 1994, she’s been on the road
(when there was a road to be on),
off to some speck-on-the-horizon
place for short-term assignments
where her clinical services as a
motivational humorist and health
care provider were needed.
When she left SAS, she formed
her own company, Health Spec
trum, which offers primary care
consulting on cost efficiency,
health care, or related problems.
Her travels provide personal hands-
on health care, many to people in
impoverished areas. As a self-
employed nurse practitioner, she
found herself in p^ces such as the
tundra in Alaska, a quaint fishing
village huddled at tiie edge of an is
land in the Aleutians, anoth^ off
the coast of North Carolina, a rural
community in Indiana, even on an
Indian reservation in Oklahoma.
"I’ve always had a strong interest
in preventive health care," she says
from her home at Preston Crossings
which has a picturesque view at the
edge of a large, peaceful pond. But
picturesque views are nothing new
to this 60-year-old mother of three
and grandinother of seven.
One of her trips last year took her
400 miles west of Anchorage to a
blur on the Alaska map called
Bethel, where she spent three
months from Apil to July. Here
she was in charge as nurse prac
titioner at a 50-bed hospital opera
ted for the Yupik and Athabascan
Indian tribes in a rugged, desolate
area. "It’saplaceawayfrcmevery
where, no roads, with access only
by plane, boat, or snowmobile," she
says. "Some 19,000 native Amer
icans live there in 49 villages in an
area roughly the size of North Da
kota. They came to the clinic only
for care or emergencies." So on her
off days at the emergency room she
visited homes in the village.
She calls Bethel an area of con
trasts. "The most beautiful thing is
the sky. But once the snow is gone,
all you see is trash everywhere,"
she says.
On another journey last July to
the Aleutian Islands, she accepted a
month’s work in a fishing i^lage
located in a quiet harbor at a place
called Popoff Island wh^e she was
the only health provider. "It’s lo
cated closer to Russia than the state
of Washington," she says.
While she administered health
care with her ever-present humor,
she found the patients equally
adept. "They told me the island was
named Popoff because its active
volcanoes pop off at times. I later
discovered it was actually named
after Ivan Popoff, the Russian who
founded the village," she says,
laughing.
Earlier that spring another call
came from closer to home, tiny
Ocracoke, the smallest of the three
barrier islands on North Carolina’s
Outer Banks. The only way to
reach the island is a 40-minute
ferry ride. She took off in April and
returned in June under the auspices
of the N.C. Rural Health Services.
"The island has a population of
about 750 and the medical facility
where I attended to patients was
manned entirely by nurses," she
says.
Ms. Butts describes a nurse prac
titioner as an RN who is working in
advanced practice, performing
some medical acts that go beyond
the scope of an RN. That means
while she is not a doctor or
physician, she performs a high per
centage (about 85 percent, she
estimates, at half the cost) of the
care a physician does. She provides
such services as a nurse practitioner
across the country through assign
ments she gets t^ugh the Indian
Health Service, a branch of the
U.S. Department of Health and Hu
man Services, the N.C. Rural
Health Services, and occasionally
from Comphealth-Kron, an agency
which fills such temporary posi
tions.
To understand Jimmie Butts’
work is to understand she is not
only a nurse practitioner, but a
motivational humorist as well. Put
the two together and you have what
a friend. Dr. Tom Brown, a mem
ber of the Cary Town Council, calls
"someone who has a gift of humor
and uses it as a kind of medicine to
@3^
SPRUDING LAUGHTER-Jimmie Butts likes deer she found in a creekbed and a piece of In
bringing home exotic souvenirs from her dian pottery,
trips-like a twig from a prickly tree, the skull of a
Council of Nurse Practitioners
Awards for service.
As a member of the National
Speakers Association, she empha
sizes her talks are not just funny. "I
talk about human relationships,
what’s the same and what’s dif
ferent, from Alpha to Omega,
Alaska to Oklahoma. People take
things too seriously and fail to see
the humor in such things. Tbere are
serious times and that only in
creases the need to be able to
laugh," she says.
That’s one of the reasons for the
humor and healing workshops she
gives various business and civic
groups. "They are not just funny,”
she says. ”I talk about human con
ditions. People in the audience may
cry as well as laugh."
Her husband is retired from IBM
and today is a commercial real
estate broker who runs his compa
ny, Margin Services, from their
home. He visits her at the far-flung
assignments, and between those oc
casions they keep close touch with
their three children and their
families.
For the next several months,
she’ll be staying at home. "I’m
working in downtown Raleigh in
the inner city serving an indigent
population, helping out at a health
ixactice, and still go back to SAS
while in town." She’s also writing
two books about her travels and
feelings.
Ms. Butts says she manages to
bring home souvenirs from her
travels, "but never T-shirts or
caps," she says with a smile.
"Usually itis things like turtle
shells, special rocks, or perhaps an
Indian artifaa. Every so often,
though, it may be an armadillo tail
or the deer skull I found in an Okla
homa creek. That elicited a Tuck’
from some of the kids, a ‘Wow’
from others and then a laugh from
us all."
Humor, it seems, is not confined
to the places she visits.
.ferry Miller
help people relax, deal with stress
and learn to enjoy their lives."
When she married Carl Butts she
was a student nurse, and he an
engineering graduate of the Univer
sity of Tennessee. They traveled to
his job locations in Massachusetts,
then to Baltimore, and finally in
1967 to the Triangle when he
joined IBM. 'We consider our
selves North Carolinians," she says,
smiling.
After graduating from a nursing
program at Mid-State Baptist Hos
pital in Nashville, she joined Rex
Hospital where she rose to head
nurse. It was in 1976 that she
earned a nurse practitioner degree
at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill School of Nursing
and then worked at Wake Health
Services Inc. before joining SAS
Institute. She was manage of the
company’s health care center when
she retired in 1994, deciding she
wanted to do more on-hands medi
cal care for people in needy areas
and devote more time to being a
humorist. That’s when she formed
her own company. Health Spec
trum.
Ms. Butts says she became inter
ested in the Unk between humor
and healing in 1982 after seeing a
workshop "The Healing Power of
Laughter and Play." She says it
taught her how managing health
can be enhanced by adding humor
to the equation of disease and trcat-
menL She feels humor can help
people deal with pain by caiming
the body to release endorphins,
pleasure-causing proteins, changing
someone’s outlook on having a
serious illness or disability, and
speed healing. She said she learned
a lot about this from dealing with
terminally ill breast cancer patients
at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute
in Boston. She worked there three
months at the beginning of last
year.
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"Even accepting death was easier
for those who laughed," she says.
A founding board member of the
Carolina Health and Humrx Asso
ciation, which promotes humor in
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ty, as well as in the community and
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titioner of the Year in 1989 by the
N.C. Nurses’ Association. The fol
lowing year she was given the
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