"I'll sit up with my flashlight so as not to disturb my husband," Clancy said.

What emerges from the tip of her sharpened pencil during those midnight moments are ideas for the cartoons she draws.

Clancy, 53, is a registered nurse. She works in the emergency room at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital and has done so for 18 years.

The focus of her wit is the medical profession and the situations that arise daily from the hospital environs.

In the ER, Clancy encounters everything from people stricken by heart attacks or gunshot wounds to those without insurance yet desperately in need of medical care.

"My cartoons focus on patients and staff," she said. "Some of it's just for medical people's eyes. Some is just inside humor."

In one cartoon, a surgeon peers into his closet, which is full of, not silk ties and Italian loafers, but identical scrubs and surgical booties.

"What to wear," he wonders. "What to wear."

Another drawing shows the "Birth of John Glenn." The newborn astronaut-to-be floats upward, bumping the ceiling while still attached by the umbilical chord to his mother - much like an astronaut, weightless and tethered to a space ship.

Clancy draws her cartoons after work and on weekends.

She draws them at her kitchen table. A pot of hot coffee provides fortification. Her pet parrot, Mango, provides company.

Clancy's style contains elements of "The Far Side," "Herman" and "Bizarro."

"I love all kinds of humor, but mine tends toward the gallows side," Clancy said.

"Fortunately, there are a few others who share that opinion and don't mind where we poke a little fun at ourselves."

Clancy has worked in a hospital ever since she was 17. She started as a nurse assistant, and she still finds great satisfaction in the profession.

Drawing began three years ago as a means to relieve the stress generated by work in the ER.

Clancy read books on drawing and went to drawing classes.

"I'd like to spend part of every day on it," she said of cartooning.

She got her sense of humor from her father, Clancy said. He used it as a means of coping with life's stresses. Likewise, the intent of Clancy's cartoons is to lighten the mood.

"Here in the hospital, you have a staff that's very dedicated to its patients, but if we're too serious all the time, we can't function as well," she said.

"I draw these as a release. I try to get people to laugh a little."

Nurses in Life
Peggy Clancy, RN
SVMHNURSE
Fall 2006

There's something funny about Peggy Clancy, RN, an ER nurse at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital (SVMH) for the past 18 years.  Seems she has quite a talent for creating cartoons that view the world of health care through humor-colored glasses.  "The ER can be an intense place," says Peggy.  "While I take patient care very seriously, I find that humor is a great stress reliever for me.  Rather than joke around inappropriately, I come home and turn my observations into cartoons."

A Michigan native and a 1977 graduate of nursing school at Daytona Beach Community College in Florida, Peggy moved to the area with her husband, an oceanographer, in the early '80s.

Known for her quick wit, Peggy started sketching cartoons more than two years ago.  Fans of Larson (The Far Side), Unger (Herman) and Piraro (Bizarro) will instantly relate to Clancy's work.  Her 'single-gag' style pairs well-done drawings with one-liners that add up to laugh-out-loud vignettes.