A Christian, a clown and a scientist — It may sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but it’s actually an accurate description of the life of WUSM professor Dana Abendschein. When he’s not cheering up kids at St. Louis Children’s hospital or volunteering for inmates at the prison, he teaches WUSM students about humor in medicine, holding true to the maxim, “laughter is the best medicine.”
In the following article, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Harry Jackson Jr. tells the story of how an overachieving researcher found fulfillment in a clown suit.
How I Did It
(Republished with permission from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This article originally ran in the Health & Fitness section on Monday, August 23, 2004)
Name: Dana Abendschein
Home: Warson Woods
Age: 52
Occupation: Professor of physiology, Washington University School of Medicine, and staff clown at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
What he did: Changed his life by dedicating himself to a ministry of making people laugh, and he believes he’s healthier for it.
Quotable: “I think the greatest thing we can do with our lives is serve others.”
Laughter’s healing power is a two-way street
Medical researcher says clowning helps him as much as it helps the patients.
By Harry Jackson Jr.
Of the Post-Dispatch
Dana Abendschein was a grim, cranky, Roman-centurion type of achiever, the sort who pops up so frequently in the high sciences, irking his fellow students by keeping the grading curve too high.
He was that guy who completed his Ph.D. when he was just 24 years old.
That gravitas made him a bit difficult to tolerate in close quarters, he says now. While a lot of students are know-it-alls, in his case, he actually did know it all, so he admits that at times, he was insufferable. “I was a very selfish and self-centered individual who wasn’t very lovable,” he says.
He’d left upstate New York steeled to succeed, an impetus that started his career early. “I’d been working in labs since I was 16,” he says. In fact, he was one of those rare people who, faced with lots of choices, turned down more than a few red carpets at medical school in favor of research.
It was a simple formula: He liked to help heal people, he just didn’t much like people.
“I seriously thought I didn’t want to deal with people,” he recalls. “It would be a hassle seeing them day after day with the same complaints. That’s how out of whack I was, pursuing a direction that I thought would be satisfying.
“When I got to that point, I was really missing a big piece of the human closeness, the sharing of one’s life for other individuals. I really had an inner emptiness and a lack of purpose in my life.
“I was kind of an empty robot type: full of information but not much else.”
No strings attached
At Purdue University, where Abendschein earned his doctoral degree, students went through enough coffee to pay off the debt of a banana republic.
The coffeepot was by the desk of Jane Venable, the 21-year-old secretary to one of Abendschein’s professors. While lightning didn’t strike when Abendschein and Venable first met, she saw promise in him. Soon, they grew on each other, more than the stern-faced Abendschein could imagine.
She got past his no-nonsense exterior. “He was a very serious student,” she says with a chuckle. A relationship began, and eventually she took him to meet her family.
Her family did something with him he hadn’t experienced much outside his own family: They welcomed him; they loved him.
“They treated me in a way I didn’t understand at first,” he says. “I was attracted to all the love in that family. They accepted my baggage and bad attitudes…
“This was the thing I’d been missing. She completed everything I wasn’t.”
So, the two got married.
Spiritual health
Dana Abendschein embraced the force that had made Jane what she was. He became a born-again Christian, a moniker he’s carried for the past quarter-century.
After their marriage, the couple eventually moved to St. Louis, 21 years ago. Abendschein went to work as a research scientist at Washington University School of Medicine.
The church they joined in St. Louis was sending some medical missionaries to Belize in Central America, and the Abendscheins decided to go. Word had gotten out that Dana Abendschein knew magic and that he’d spent some spare time in his youth learning to be a clown – something he’d learned could put smiles on the faces of others, and something he’d lost for awhile in his quest for success.
Using clowning and magic made the trip more fruitful, he says. It helped people open up to the medical team as well as to the team’s Christian message. Laughter had a magic about it that no one had anticipated. When people laughed, they listened and they felt better, he says.
Back home, the Abendscheins used their clowning in their church’s prison ministry and paired it with a program to help inmates relate to their children.
About 10 years ago, they took the show to St. Louis Children’s Hospital – he as Professor Dude, she as Dr. Tickles. (As Professor Dude, Abendschein carries a satchel made of men’s underwear that he calls his “brief-case” – Get it? Briefs? – and a roll of toilet paper for paperwork. He and Jane wear red noses and colorful outfits.) It went over so well that the hospital named Dana Abendschein the honorary staff clown.
“If we can go into a room and change the mood of the patient and the family from one of being focused on the critical illness to a point where they’re focused on laughter … you get them to feel, ‘Yeah (the illness) is still there, but I know I’m going to make it through because I’m happier,'” Abendschein says. “Sometimes it’s impossible for a nurse or a doctor to break through that barrier of despair and provide a distraction, and humor is a great way to break that door down.”
In a hospital, that’s doubly important, he says.
“The more we make people laugh, the more we help them understand how they can make themselves happy,” he says. “So when we come in and entertain and do some visual things and play with them a little, we’re helping to remind them of things they already know; certain things to think about and do to make them happy.”
Of course, this has health benefits for the patients. Laughter:
- Increases your heart rate.
- Increases respiration.
- Puts you in a mood to feel positive about yourself.
- Helps you think clearly.
- Releases chemicals that suppress stress hormones.
“And it’s true that as we laugh, we’re stimulating the connections between our minds and the rest of our bodies and making ourselves healthier,” Abendschein says.
While this is a ministry, he says they don’t preach. Instead, they set an example.
“We affirm whatever faith our patients need,” he says. “But we want Christ to be seen through us and our character and our compassion, as we do our work and our job.”
The therapeutic elements can surpass that. In one case, Abendschein recalls, the couple blew bubbles around an autistic child, and the child broke his eternal silence and began to reach for the bubbles and smile. Then he spoke – in his own language – and the magic of the clowns and the bubbles and the caring had helped bring him closer to the surface.
The schedule
Every Tuesday, Abendschein works as a clown at Children’s Hospital. Weekends include the prison ministry, where he and his wife sometimes work as clowns. Other times they take reading materials to help prisoners read to their children.
He also teaches a course at the medical school on humor in medicine and has trained several medical students in the art of clowning in a hospital. And the Abendscheins run Show Me Clowns for Jesus, a clown conference ministry that has met annually for 20 years at the Lake of the Ozarks.
Health regimen
Abendschein’s laboratory is on the ninth floor of the medical school, and he walks the stairs more than he takes the elevator. Also, he and Jane eat a “very low-fat diet.”
He relaxes by gardening in the evening. Even that is about service. “People driving down the street see the garden and they’re thinking about 100 things, they see the flowers and they enjoy that. It’s another way to help.”
He’s also helped by the uplifting feelings he gets from seeing others laugh and feel good.
“In my opinion, that’s the best way for a Christian to operate,” he says. “Wherever you are, wherever God has put you, whether you write articles or you’re in a lab, that’s what gives us joy.”
That has helped him spread his brand of spiritual happiness to others. He says he didn’t run around the hospital preaching, but let students and others approach him. They wanted to know his secret to being happy.
Before long, he was leading a gaggle of clowns around Children’s Hospital. Under the paint, colored clothes and clown noses were medical students and research fellows.
With the package of a loving family – two married children, a grandchild and a wife who clowns with him – and purpose, he said, “I feel I’m less stressed. I feel like this inner rudder, the keel of my boat that gives me stability, helps me put things in perspective on a daily basis.
“I don’t see each issue I used to face as big as I used to. I used to worry a lot more about my position, my future, my role in a project at the university – lots of things we worry about every day. I’ve become healthier by giving that up, letting it go and realizing that I just need to make each day count, save time to love my wife, my kids, and be a grandparent and the other things I’m called to do.”
Reporter Harry Jackson Jr.
E-mail: hjaxson@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8234
Copyright 2004 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.