Comedian Finds The Humor And Heart In Chronic Illness

Learn more about Laura Lyons and her podcast “Iconically Ill” at her website.

Born With Jazz Hands

Laura Lyons was born with jazz hands.

My mom called me Ethel Merman because I would  just always, always making songs, always goofing off, always performing. I came out of the womb with jazz hands, was both innate and nurture. 

When she was five or six she saw her local high school perform Guys and Dolls.

And I thought, this is it. I want to do whatever this is. So I sung opera and classical music usually along with some Disney songs, because you know, you're five. You can't always be singing like Les Miserables at the age of six. You don't really have that much life experience then, but always acted, always sung.

In the second grade Laura recalls getting in trouble for disrupting class.

But I remember I made a joke to my teacher who always, I mean she almost was kind of a bully in a way to me because she just pointed me out and decided that I was the bad kid. But one time I got a laugh from her. And It was so silly, I still remember it from this day. It's not gonna be funny when I relay this, guys. But we were doing addition and it was one plus one and I put up my two fingers and I put them next to each other and I jokingly said, oh, 11. And she bursted out laughing and I said, whoa, I can win over my bully. Like I can win over someone through humor.

It was this realization that sparked a new reason for being. This is a story about how Laura continues to rely on her sense of humor to persist through chronic illness. This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

Humor To Deflect

At a young age Laura discovered her people, only they were on TV. “Saturday Night Live” and “I Love Lucy” opened her eyes to a whole new world.

It was a glimmer in my eye, a little sparkle in my eye. And then I grew up really knowing the Tina Fey, the Amy Poehlers, that group. But Molly Shannon was this force. And so was Lucille Ball. I love Lucy. She showed that women can actually have a personality and can be the funny one. And I always thought I'm, you know, never going to find someone that wants to marry me because I'm the goofball. And so to see Lucy, you know, shoving chocolate in her mouth at a high speed or Vita Vita Vegemin was so eye opening and so relatable to how I was energeticwise.

Laura frequently got in trouble for her own goofball personality.

LAURA: Oh my gosh, I got in trouble so much. Always the feedback was she talks too much. She has too many friends. She talks on the phone too much. She doesn't focus on her studies. I got suspended in the fifth grade because I was talking too much and my teacher yelled at all of us. My friend passed a note that said PMS. I wrote back and I thought, well, I can't swear in it. So what's an alternative to ass? And I thought rectum. So I wrote ‘rectum hole’ and I got suspended for that.  

LAUREL: Oh c’mon.

LAURA: I know it was a really strict school, but yeah, I always got in trouble for being me. And in comedy I was rewarded for that. You know, being zany, being out of the box, being a night owl.

Only later would Laura come to understand that she used humor to deflect attention from her ADHD and dyslexia.

LAURA:  I distinctly remember that of, ‘wow, if I can make someone laugh, maybe they won't target me.’

LAUREL: So it became a defense mechanism.

LAURA:  It did and it definitely did with my ADHD because I always think the reason why I'm so good at improv was I couldn't do some of the reading because I also have dyslexia.  I would five minutes before the class have a friend who did the reading tell me what it was, give me a one to two minute synopsis and then I just expanded the story into symbolism into whatever I wanted and I improv'd it all. And I prefer talking on the phone and listening to my friends problems rather than doing my homework because I couldn't really comprehend it or it would take too long and it was embarrassing. I think with my learning disabilities, humor served a huge purpose for me.

After graduation Laura went to George Washington University in DC to study business.

I was a business major at first because I thought, ‘no, I need to make money. I need to be serious about this.’ And I took an accounting class and hysterically cried on the bus, called my parents and was like, ‘I can't do this. My brain doesn't work.’ And I switched to a double major of fine arts and art history. And I actually felt like I could breathe.

 ‘Big Magic’

Equipped with her degree she got a cubicle job in Boston.

That’s when she started having anxiety attacks. And her doctor put her on a low dose of anti-anxiety medication.

I always say it saved my life because my panic attacks were so bad. I think there were numerous reasons why, but I actually think one of them was I wasn't aligned with what my soul needed, which was comedy and stage and performing. It was such a stark difference from being in this art world going to museums for free, because in DC all the museums are free, and going to galleries and all this stuff, to this gray world of cubicle in Boston just did not align with who I am at all.

It wasn’t until she read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book “Big Magic” that she realized what she must do. Gilbert says, “too many women still seem to believe that they are not allowed to put themselves forward until both they and their work are perfect and beyond criticism.” She goes on to say that “perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes.”

It changed my life. The best line was, ‘don't be a lazy perfectionist, be a half-assed doer.’ And that line changed my life because I was so scared that I hadn't been on stage that I didn’t go to NYU, that I didn’t go to Tisch School, that I was out of the game. I feel it's really easy once you get off that stage to see it as fear. And I didn't follow the fear for a while until I was 26. And I said, ‘no, I'm gonna commit to this.’ 

So Laura pivoted, landed a job at a nonprofit in New York City, earning a paycheck by day and hitting the comedy clubs by night.

And it wouldn't be perfect and I didn't have the perfect script and then I realized with comedy especially and live performance is you have to get it on its legs and you have to practice and you have to edit and it takes feedback and criticism. It takes a lot of time and drafts to get where a sketch needs or a character. I loved how ephemeral it was. It was so short-lived. It was a burst of energy. And then you got to change it up. I just thought, why are you so scared of perfectionism and it's okay to make mistakes and just pursue it and go. 

‘The Grind Isn’t Sexy’

After work Laura would hit the gym, then from seven to midnight and weekends she’d perform and create characters.

…and I said this is my life until I get on SNL.  

 She believed if she worked hard enough she could manifest it. 

You know, it wasn't uncommon for me to go to three boroughs in one night, doing different sketches, hauling my wigs and my costumes. I'll never forget, I was a giant melted cookie. And I had this costume that I had to drag from burro to burro in one night. And the magic marker that I made on the chocolate chips was coming off of the material. So my hands were covered in it. Everything was covered in marker. And I got home at two in the morning and I was like, I have to wake up in five hours to get to work. 

It was a grueling schedule. She was constantly sleep deprived. Laura says she was so busy she even had to schedule time for a seven minute crying session every now and then. 

It was a grind, I was exhausted all the time. But it felt like, wow, I'm taking life back. I'm taking life into what I want it to be. Though I've slept two hours in seven days, I actually am pursuing what I want to pursue.

Some comedians say it takes five to seven years of unpaid work just to break into the business of paid gigs.

LAURA: There's a lot of falling down and getting back up. There's a lot of rejection with auditions. There's a lot of awkwardness with auditions. I mean, I've gone through auditions and forgotten lines during it. I've even said one time, ‘line’ and they said, ‘this is your own piece, how do you not have your script in front of you?’ And I was like, ‘right.’ There's always something sexy when you say pursuing your dreams. Like you think it's this really glamorous thing, but it was a grind. And it still is a grind, but it was something I had to do. In my body, I could feel it. I felt aligned.

SOUND FROM ONE OF LAURA’S VIDEOS “Not Killing It”

LAUREL: So even on hard days of rejection or messing up an audition, what kept you going?

LAURA: I think knowing that I felt home when I did these things, that I felt complete, my soul felt complete. I was born with jazz hands and I'm gonna die with jazz hands. That energy and being with people that also would die for this sport essentially, we got each other. And that was something that was so rare and I felt I could peel off the layers of who I thought I had to be and I could just be.

March 24, 2020

But in March of 2020 Laura received a strange text from a friend of Mayor Bloomberg’s daughter.

And she said, the city's gonna shut down. And he wrote in the text, ‘not to yell fire in a movie theater, but run.’ That text circulated all over New York City because everyone screenshotted it and sent it to all of their loved ones. I've never packed faster in my life. I was sweating. I was shaking. I was throwing things in a suitcase. I called every single person I knew, I said, ‘the city's shutting down. This is gonna be really bad.’

Laura managed to get out of New York and home to Worcester, Massachusetts. But a couple days later she couldn’t take a full breath and thought she might have Covid. Patients had overwhelmed the hospitals. These were the days when officials said don’t come in unless you are showing specific symptoms.

LAURA: I started to lose my breath and I've had anxiety in the past so I thought maybe it's a panic attack. I called my doctor and I said, ‘I think I'm dying,’ and she said, ‘no you're not, just download the Calm app.’ 

LAUREL:  Are you kidding?

LAURA: Cut to me dying. She no longer practices medicine. I think she was traumatized after that. But believe women when they say, ‘I think I'm dying’ and don't say it's in your head and it's hysteria because the Calm app wasn't gonna be saving me anytime soon. So it was very bizarre. My lungs were shutting off, telling my brain you're dying and my anxiety thought you're having suicidal thoughts. When I went into the hospital I said, ‘I either have COVID or I need to go to the psych ward.’ I couldn't tell the difference. But it was because I was actively dying that my brain was telling me something's wrong. 

LAUREL: Wow, wow.

LAURA: The last thing I remember was this woman looking at me with really pitiful, sorrow eyes and saying, ‘we have to put you on a ventilator.’ And at that point, I had no idea. None of us really knew the language behind any of this – 

LAUREL: – Or the statistics.

LAURA: Or the statistics. We didn't have any of that. So I thought, yeah, sure, whatevs, no prob, no biggie.

They put me on a ventilator and they called my parents and they said, you have six hours to live.

Laura learned later her elderly parents were sick with Covid at home and her mom has asthma.

My sister found out the news and she's an Aries and she said, nope, not on my watch. So she went into research mode and she contacted all of her friends that are nurses, doctors, any type of medical staff she could. And I had a friend who's a pulmonologist and there was something called ECMO. And ECMO was just a glimmer in all of our eyes. We had never heard of it. 

ECMO or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation is the last form of life support – both heart and lung – for critically ill patients.

So they put me in a coma and they medical helicoptered me to MGH in Boston. And they put me on ECMO. I was the last person to have a machine available and they closed the doors. And they said no visitors, there's no visitor policy. All the staff were in their hazmat suits. 

She was on ECMO for five weeks, a ventilator for 99 days and on day 100 when she woke up with a tracheostomy tube in her windpipe and paralyzed from head to toe, unable to talk, walk, eat or use the bathroom. On top of all that she was disoriented but she couldn’t ask any questions.

I was on stronger drugs that killed Michael Jackson. Even waking up from coma, I was considered a drug addict. So I was having severe drug withdrawals on top of the pain I was already suffering from... I couldn't do anything to say why, why, why, what is going on? I didn't even know that I had COVID. And I remember looking at the clock and just thinking, ‘if I can make it past this one second, I can make it past another second.’ And then I did that for 15 seconds. And then I said, ‘okay, you can do it for another 15 seconds.’ So I did 30 seconds and then I said, all right, if you can do this, you can make it to the 45 and then you can make it to a minute. I figured out patterns. That was the only thing I could do was figure out patterns because no one was answering my questions because no one was there. So I had to think, ‘Laura, you have to get really smart about this. You have to figure out what is going on.’ So I knew I was in a hospital. I didn't know where. I thought my family was dead. No one was there visiting me so I figured, well, no one's here. They must be dead because I'm here for days and months and I don't see anyone. On the TV, me being on a ton of drugs, I didn't realize what these protests were. The BLM protests were happening and I thought this has to do with Covid and on the banner below it said 200,000 deaths.

Learning To Walk Again

Her one saving grace was an intuitive nurse named Meg.

This one nurse Meg, who really understood my suffering on a spiritual level. She even one time, my eyes were so itchy and I think it's because I couldn't really blink them because I was paralyzed. And she knew I had itchy eyes. And picture having an itch that you can't scratch for hours.And she came in and she was like, ‘you know what? I think your eye's twitching. Let me put some drops in your eyes.’ And there were things like that where she knew the way they positioned me was really uncomfortable and I couldn't move my head to get comfortable. She would go, ‘you know what? I think you need another pillow.’ She would explain to me what happened to me.And she eventually got my family on the phone over FaceTime. What I didn't know when I was in a coma was I think they thought I was a goner and they had made friends with my sister. And I think they had my sister come in because they thought someone needs to say their final words to me. And she dressed up, they snuck her in. She dressed up in entire hazmat suit and she held my hand and my heart rate went down, which was a miracle. 

After three months in the hospital the doctor sent her to a rehabilitation facility for another three months where she learned to walk, talk, eat and go to the bathroom.

You have to humble yourself, you have to remove all ego and pride because you're learning to do something that you a already did and b did as a child…coming from a world where the wheels were turning at such a fast pace to going back to learning just the basics drove me crazy. It was a lesson in patience, which I didn't have, especially running around Manhattan, you know doing 30,000 steps in one day of just running around from Staten Island to Brooklyn to Manhattan.

It was around this time Laura learned that while she was in the hospital, her parents packed up her apartment in New York and she’d likely never see it again.

LAURA: So there was a lot of mourning going on. There was a lot of, ‘you're gonna have to move back home and you're gonna be sick for a really long time’ and I'm still mourning.

LAUREL: So I'm guessing you had physical therapists, occupational therapists. Did you have emotional therapists?

LAURA: Funny you should say that, Laurel, because it was COVID, so there was still insane protocols with visitors. One day, out comes this nurse and behind her is a robot on wheels. And she goes, ‘I have a therapist.’ And I said, ‘where's the therapist?’ And she said, in here. She plugged in this robot. And out comes a man's voice and a man's face. And he said, ‘hi, I'm Dr. So-and-so. Do you have any suicidal thoughts?’ And I thought, ‘if I didn't before, I have them now.’

LAUREL: Oh my gosh.

LAURA: Because I'm not gonna tell a robot man my deepest, darkest secrets with a nurse just standing there like a bouncer. What is that? So, I was very alarmed, but I cried to my physical therapists all the time and my nurses all the time. And they were my emotional therapists. I've never cried that much in my entire life. There was definitely no scheduling a seven minute cry sesh. It was every day. The nurses and the PTs and the OTs were my, they were my family, they were my friends, they were my support system.

Taken Off Her Rose Colored Glasses

Today she sees a therapist once a week, she’s strapped to an oxygen cord and primarily in a wheelchair when she has the energy to leave the house. All her disability money goes toward her physical therapy to try to strengthen her lungs. 

For Laura Covid turned into a rare disease called Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome caused by scarred lungs. And it’s changed her outlook on her future.

LAURA: You know, before this, all my passwords were set to like, you're going to get on SNL. It was like, let's manifest, let's go, let's have goal sheets. I had yearly goals, then quarter goals, month goals, and then weekly goals. And I was so set on this one trajectory. And I was so set on positivity. And now I don't really believe karma. Now I don't know about manifesting. I think karma is essentially a tool to oppress people that are already in a vulnerable situation. It's toughened me up. It's made my rose colored glasses come off, but I'll never stop trying and I'll never stop having grit. And I think you have to be determined to try to heal from this, but you also have to surrender.

LAUREL: How did you come to that realization that you need to surrender?

LAURA: It's been gradual. It's been a lot of reading. It's been a lot of writing. I think because the pain is so loud, it becomes the forefront of your mind and you have to surrender to it and be okay with it. And it was a gradual thing. I've had to just give myself grace that I'm not at where I was weight wise and physically wise. And, you know, I was boxing, I was doing barre, was doing spinning every single week. And to go from that to walk to the bathroom and coming back and needing a nap is really different. And so I think It was my body that told me this, that my body told me to surrender because that's all you can do and you have to be okay with it. But it was a process.

‘Iconically Ill’

For the first couple years home Laura listened to a lot of podcasts hoping some day she’d have the energy to sit upright long enough to launch her own. That day came at the end of last year. Laura started a podcast called Iconically Ill. On it she interviews other disabled and chronically ill people with humor and heart.

I ask them at the end of the episode every week, the triangle of what and that's pertaining to your illness. How do you feel about the words hope, delusion and acceptance? Because acceptance I think is the hardest one for me especially. And it changes every day. Like I haven't accepted that I'm on oxygen for the rest of my life. And I don't know if I will be. I've had doctors say I will be, but I'm living in my delusion era and I choose not that life and I choose that lungs regenerate and I choose we don't know what this disease is and I choose that I’ll get better and I'll move back to New York.

Huge transition from not only living on my own, being really independent to now living on my parents couch back in Massachusetts is my comedy was so physical. I was very slapstick rolling around on the ground doing anything I could to make get a laugh. And now I've had to control the controllables and I'm like, well, I can't be on stage. What can I do? So for me, I turned to TikTok and I make TikToks now for my comedy. And I thought, ‘well, my voice is now working. I can do long forms.’ So then I did my podcast. But TikTok was great because it was short form. I could do five seconds and then pass out for hours.

I was willing to do that because I needed to do it to get my creativity out. And it's been a godsend. It's my been my creative outlet. And I think even through hardship, you still have to find your purpose. It's the only way to keep going. 

LAUREL: Right, like what can I do today?

LAURA: Yes, what is my body allowing me to do? And can I get something done and can I chip away at it? Or is it a bed day and I have to be okay with that. 

LAUREL: How do you find peace with that? 

LAURA: Oh it's so hard. Oh it’s so hard. That's the biggest thing I struggle with every day, especially having a doctor tell you you'll be on oxygen for the rest of your life. Kind of defying that is now my main mission to not get a lung transplant because they're really tough. Only 50% survive the surgery. The remaining percent, only 50% make it past a year and then the average life expectancy is six years. Yeah, it's the only organ that is exposed to the outside world because your nose and your mouth have give you access to outside elements. So you're prone to infection, rejection, you're on anti-rejection medicine, it's brutal. I live in this kind of two world, two paths of acceptance or hope. And they feel very separate right now because if I have hope that means I haven't accepted that I'll be on oxygen. And if I've accepted that means I don't have hope that I'll come off it. So I straddle between those two worlds a lot. The healthiest to live in the present. And I think the present is accepting that I'm on oxygen and then for the future hoping that I'll be off it.

LAUREL: I love the the triangle of hope, acceptance and delusion that you talk about on your podcast. And we've talked about hope and acceptance. Is there anything with delusion that you want to add?

LAURA: I live in delusion. I think it's great. think when you phrase something if versus when, that's huge. So I always try to say when I'll get this instead of if I'll get this. living in a creative daydream is what helped me survive being in the hospital. For so long was I just was picturing a beautiful world outside and daydreaming and I'm still daydreaming.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.