Salt Lake school kids who line up for swine-flu shots this fall won't have any trouble finding the school nurse in the crowd. She'll be wearing a pig's nose and waving a pink pen topped with a flashing miniature porker.

"We'll resort to anything to keep another kid from asking, 'Will it hurt?' " says Lynne Calame, one of six nurses for the Salt Lake City School District.

If she and her coworkers had a nickel for every time they'd been asked that question, "we could have retired 10 times over," she says. She holds up another of her gimmicks — a rubber chicken used for chicken-pox talks — and smiles. "But why would we do that? We're having too much fun."

Now celebrating 30 years as a school nurse, Calame recently joined me in her office for a Free Lunch of takeout turkey sandwiches and tomato soup during a break from her comedy routine.

Although nursing is serious work, "we try to lighten things up for the kids," says Calame, 60, who has a nameplate on her desk proclaiming that she is "Queen of All Things — She Who is to be Obeyed."

"The stereotype from the movies is that we're mean and snarly, sort of like Nurse Ratched (from the film, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest")," she says. "But we're nothing but nice to the kids. We give out free lip balm and cough drops, we give hugs, we tell jokes. Humor is a way to help us nurses cope. Because believe me, we see everything."

Indeed, from handing out Band-Aids to giving insulin shots to young diabetics and making occasional house calls, today's school nurses handle an incredible workload. Besides having the lowest per-pupil funding in the nation, Utah also has the worst nurse-to-student ratio.

No big surprise there, says Calame, who cringes when she reads the latest statistics: There is one school nurse for every 5,800 children in Utah, while the national recommendation is to have one for every 750.

"Why can't we do better for our kids?" she asks. "The teachers and school secretaries are the ones who end up doing most of the care because we can't always be there."

Calame is responsible for six schools and oversees the health and safety of more than 6,000 students, some with serious health issues such as asthma and seizures. She's also in charge of maturation assemblies for fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders, an assignment that always yields giggles and awkward questions.

Moments like these are when her sense of humor and stage props come in handy. "The maturation talks are the favorite thing I do," she says, "although the questions can get a little interesting. There are some kids who know way more than they should. They've grown up too fast."