Obsessed with breakfast radio and always the nurse at the desk telling stories on night shifts, Kelly Scorey needed to find some fun through the pandemic.
So, what did she do? She started a podcast.
“I thought, we need something fun in our lives because we’re nurses, and we’re in a lockdown in a pandemic that’s killing us. I told everyone around me that I might do one, and not a single person told me no. So I was like, well, maybe I will.” Kelly said.
However, a good podcast will often need a good co-host, and that’s where fellow nurse Alisha Beavis comes into this story.
“We do banter really well,” Kelly said.
“But we also can have these little tiffs about stuff where we’re both right.
“We interpret things differently, but it works.”
Alicia said they constantly challenged each other on the thinking and clinical reasoning of everything, but then could move on and laugh about it. Even if neither will admit, they are wrong or right.
After googling how to start a podcast and conversing with their work and the union around legalities and social media policies, the girls got the okay.
They brought some equipment, taught themselves how to record and edit, and then, from Kelly's lounge room, the Two Humerus Nurses podcast was formed.
2024 marks their fourth year, and the podcast has had over 280,000 downloads.
Their content is around the lighter side of nursing and includes dark humour.
“We knew we wanted it to be funny, and we wanted it to be like a source of entertainment for nurses rather than another eye roll of CPD,” Alisha said.
CPD stands for ‘continuing professional development’ by the way, and after a short time behind the microphone recording, the girls said they realised they were doing ‘exactly’ what they should be doing.
“The feedback we got quickly was that we made nursing fun again, and we reminded people why they love it and why you can go in and have the worst shift of your life and hate your job for that day, but at the heart of it, you still love it,” Kelly said.
Their first podcast was called ‘Who the hell are we?’ They dived into the who, what, how, when and why of starting a podcast and what they hoped to get out of it.
They covered topics around nurses’ intuition and the gut feelings they will get when they see a patient and instantly know something is wrong.
They also chatted about the colloquialisms around the effects of a full moon on dementia patients and women in labour.
The first year was a busy one for the girls, they spent many hours researching topics and still do this day do. However, both girls admitted that as time has gone on, a lot has changed.
“I feel like the episodes get more and more ridiculous as time goes on because we’ll get suggestions from people now,” Alisha said.
“Recently, we did an episode on feet. And we got into the only fans of the feet world.
“The nursing lines get blurrier and blurrier as time goes on.”
Kelly said their most popular episodes were now around deep-dive conversations where her investigative journalism skills are needed.
“So, a nurse in America was recently charged with murder. She gave a drug to a patient and killed them. There was a lot of talk around if she should have been charged. And what the hospital could have done?” Kelly said.
“So, I did a really big deep dive into that. And that was really interesting because there was a lot of support for her.”
“That really shook the nursing world,” Alisha said.
“You dedicate your career to helping people and then make a mistake and go to prison. I think that’s a scary thought for a lot of people.”
Kelly then added with humour that they now have a series called ‘nurses who kill’ that has stories dated back to the 1800s.
And with a burst of laughter by both girls, she added, “It makes you stop and think about your colleagues.”
From opening up about personal experiences, including Alicia’s birth story, to honest moments where their nurse hats have been required in public, to a whole episode on foreign bodies where people put things inside themselves, which, by the way, are not always the reasons, you may be thinking.
They cover it all.
“It’s a different ball-game, but I guess that’s why we’ve had a lot of people listen who aren’t nurses,” Alisha said.
“They might be a bit confronted about some of the content or our demeanour around certain things, but sometimes we just need to find a way of coping and find the lighter side to all the horrible shit that goes on.
“We don’t have any power over what people get offended by, and we are proud of the content that we produce.
“Kelly and I are so open with one another. So, recording the podcast makes it easy for us to be our natural selves, have our walls down, and talk about real things.
“But then it might go from this super serious conversation, and then we’ll be like, you should see the photo of him, and then it becomes a laughing matter.”
‘Till death do us part’ was how the girls described their friendship, and both said that alongside the beautiful feedback they received from their listeners, their friendship is what keeps them going.
The podcast is bold, brilliant, and brave. It encapsulates humour, is witty, confrontational, informative, wild, and honest, and the girls find things to laugh at that other people might not, but that’s what makes it unique and authentic.
It’s worth a listen. Here are the podcast links to suss it out for yourself.
Spotify: tinyurl.com/TwoHumerusNurses
Podbean: twohumerusnurses.podbean.com
This story originally appeared in Betty. You can find the full publication at http://tinyurl.com/BETTY-Oct2023