If you’ve ever seen a Dr. Glaucomflecken comedy video, chances are good that you wear hospital scrubs to work, take medical histories and have replaced a Foley catheter on less than two hours of sleep. If so, you probably also recognize many of the characters in the fictional Glaucomflecken Hospital — or know versions of them in your own hospital.

They include the Emergency Physician, the casual, bicycle-jersey-and-helmet-wearing trauma junkie who was born without a circadian rhythm. There’s the Neurologist, who is arrogant, condescending and convinced that his specialty is the hospital’s most important. There’s the vampiric Radiologist, who hasn’t seen daylight since college, and the Orthopedist, who’s quick to remind a new medical student that, “Yo, school bro, you don’t need a stethoscope on this rotation ... You can’t hear bones healing.”

All sprout from the creative mind of Dr. Will Flanary, aka Dr. Glaucomflecken, a standup comic and practicing ophthalmologist in Portland, Ore. In 2016, Will began posting short, satirical videos on Twitter that skewer the American health care system. His wildly popular YouTube channel has since grown to more than 360 videos and more than 1 million subscribers.
Will’s wife, Kristin Flanary, aka Lady Glaucomflecken, is the other half of the Glaucomflecken comedy team and cofounder of the couple’s comedic podcast, “Knock Knock, Hi!” Though she doesn’t wear a white coat for a living, Kristin studied cognitive neuroscience and social psychology at Dartmouth College before shifting gears into marketing and communications. Beginning last year, she took over the full-time job of managing the Glaucomflecken comedy universe of videos, social media and national speaking engagements.



But the Flanarys’ life together hasn’t all been a laughing matter. While still in medical school at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, Will was diagnosed for the first time with testicular cancer, and again during his residency at the University of Iowa.

Then in May 2020, Will experienced sudden cardiac arrest in bed at home. While the couple’s two young children slept in a neighboring room, Kristin performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Will for 10 minutes before paramedics arrived, a deeply traumatic experience that left her largely unable to speak for six weeks.

As she wrote in the Journal of Cardiac Failure in September 2022:

“I remember many things from my husband's sudden cardiac arrest at 34 years old – the guttural, panicked sounds of his agonal breathing in our darkened bedroom; the timbre of his voice as a pocket of air passed through his vocal cords in response to my chest compressions; the sight of his body turning gray and the sound of it slamming against the floor with the first shock from the defibrillator.”

Kristin’s experience, coupled with the abysmal attention she received in the hospital as a “co-survivor,” inspired her to become an advocate for patients and other co-survivors of medical emergencies and chronic illnesses, who are often overlooked or ignored by the health care system.

On Friday, September 29, Kristin Flanary will be the keynote speaker at the University of Vermont Cancer Center’s Women’s Health and Cancer Conference. Although in-person registration for the conference is now closed, online attendance is still available.

Seven Days interviewed Kristin by phone from her home in the Portland area, during which she explained, among other things, that "glaucomflecken" is, in fact, a real ophthalmological term.

Was Dr. Glaucomflecken born from Will’s cancer or his cardiac arrest?
The first cancer predates any of it. Will first got cancer during medical school at Dartmouth. He’d dabbled in standup comedy since high school, but when he went to med school there wasn’t much time for that, obviously. But when he got cancer, he went back to it as his coping mechanism, writing jokes about cancer. But then we had a baby, and he switched more to comedy writing. Then during his residency, he got cancer a second time, and we had a second baby, and he started doing comedy online because he didn’t need to go anywhere.
Do you ever marvel at the random medical factoids you’ve learned? Who knew that the Def Leppard song “Pour Some Sugar on Me” contained the cure for a prolapsed rectum.
I know! There have been some very strange, random facts that I could have lived without knowing, but now I do. There have been a lot of really disgusting ones. Hearing the things that people do to their own bodies voluntarily is eye-opening.

After doing CPR on Will for 10 minutes, you completely shut down for six weeks. What happened?
I think it’s a pretty normal shock response. I’ve since heard from people in my DMs and online comments saying, “Thank you for putting that into words. It happened to me, too.”

There’s not a medical term for it, at least, not one in the vernacular. Of course, I come from a cognitive neuroscience background, so this was fascinating to me. Even when I was going through it, I was like, This is very interesting. It was similar to an outer-body experience, where you’re watching your life happening to you but you’re not fully plugged into it.

Can you describe it?
I couldn’t speak. That was just one factor but a very noticeable one. I wasn’t mute, but I couldn’t carry on a conversation. I could talk about the logistics of the day, Will’s health, be a parent to my children and get them in bed. But if someone tried ot sit down and say, “How are you doing?” I just couldn’t follow a conversation. Or participate in one.

What brought you back?
Time was definitely a factor. But what brought me back were other people’s words. I needed words to understand and process what I was going through.

Also, one of the things I found was the Lay-Responder & Bystander Resource Guide, compiled by a paramedic named Paul Snobelen, from Peel, Ontario. He’d been working with people from the general public who’d provided CPR and had many of the same questions and experiences I did. That really helped.

When you’re providing CPR and you see someone die, all the natural death processes start happening. And when you’re doing CPR on a loved one in particular — and about 70 percent of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests happen at home — the majority of bystander CPR is performed by a loved one. So that’s really traumatic.



One of the things I try to shout from the rooftops is, yes, it’s important that we train people in CPR because it can save lives under the right circumstances. But if we’re going to train people to step in and do CPR, we have to recognize that it is a traumatic thing to do for many people and provide support for them afterward.

Another thing that helped was the book, In Shock: My Journey From Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope, by Rana Awdish. She’s a pulmonary and critical care physician, but she’s also a critical illness patient herself with a pretty dramatic illness story.

She writes about how interesting it was to see her illness from both sides and how her own field treated her as a patient. She was able to see gaps in the health care system that she wasn’t able to see when she only had the physician perspective. That was really validating for me because it showed me it wasn’t just in my head. I experienced some of those gaps myself, and it added to the trauma.

What “gaps” did you experience?
Granted, this happened in May 2020 in the early day of COVID, so early protocols were all up the air. There was a lot we didn’t know, and there was a lot of fear. So I hope that a lot of what happened to me wouldn’t happen again. But I think some of them still would, because they’re just oversights. No one is trying to cause harm. It’s just from a lack of forethought and empathy for what this experience must be like for family members. It’s a very disease-focused system, and that creates some harmful side effects.

Can you give me an example?
They put me in a waiting area in radiology, where the walls are lined with lead, which completely cuts off your cellphone service. It’s little things like that I know they didn’t even think about. So I’d walk down the hallway to try to get a signal, because when something like that happens, you’re the liaison to everybody else in the family. Not to mention that I needed support from my social network.

Eventually they ended up kicking me out of the hospital because they said I was making people nervous by doing that. It was thoughtless things like that. I wasn’t on anyone’s radar, and none of my needs were factored into the situation.

You and Will poke fun at the health care system, which must be very therapeutic for the people who work in those professions. But has your work resulted in changes in medical practices or hospital policies?
Yes. After my talks I’ve heard physicians and other clinicians say that this perspective really changed their practice and they now do certain things differently.

We’ve gotten DMs from people who work for these large insurance companies or have a family member or friend who do. Early on, there was the chief medical officer of one of the very large insurance companies who was upset by Will’s videos and called an internal meeting at his company to get them scrubbed from the internet. Obviously, that’s not how the internet works. It’s getting their attention, and they’re not liking it. And that’s good, right? Because that’s the whole point.
Have you and Will gotten negative reactions from physicians?
Every once in a while, Will would hear from someone, usually someone very nice, who would present a perspective he hadn’t thought about for why something might be the way it is. So if he agreed, he would apologize and take [the video] down. But it happens a lot less now because he’s learned those lessons the hard way.

But Will has a very strict policy of not punching down. That’s a rule of comedy. So, we don’t make fun of patients. There is a hierarchy in medicine and you don’t punch down the hierarchy. He’s just making fun of himself, of other physicians, insurance companies and the health care system.

Do you routinely get requests to roast other specialties?
Oh, yeah! His characters are a comedic exaggeration, but people see their daily lives reflected back in his skits. And they can show it to their family members and friends and say, “See? This is what it’s like for me every day, and this is what I have to deal with.” I think that’s why these videos have resonated so much. He’s done a good job of making people seen and understood. And that’s the heart of what we both do.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.