Chapter 5 Humor

   Cancer is a serious subject but we don't have to be so serious about it.

   At first there is nothing humorous about cancer.  You have worked through your feelings resulting from receiving your diagnosis.  You have learned to live with cancer and identified your way of accepting it. (Chapter 3) Treatment is hard.  You have examined your degrees of patience, endurance and courage (Chapter 4).  You have dealt with some hard, stressful emotions.  Now let humor lighten your stress.

   Did you know you can Google "Cancer Jokes"?  There are hundreds of jokes there, something for everyone's sense of humor.  Maybe you enjoy physical jokes, like slipping on a banana peel or, verbal jokes where the use of a wrong word creates the humor.  Cancer jokes contain a lot of Death Jokes but for those of us looking death in the face, these can be strangely comforting.  They help us think about death without feeling threatened by it.  My favorite are "Real Doctor's Notes".  It makes me giggle to imagine a doctor on a hurried visit to your bedside, scribbling notes such as:

• "--on the second day the knee was better and then on the third day it disappeared"                              or
• "Discharge status: alive but without my permission"      or
• "Patient has 2 teenage children but no other abnormalities"   or
• "Patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in l993"

   Find your favorite joke and share it here.

   There are persons who seem to be able to find something humorous in any situation.  Shelva, a student in one of my classes, was such a person.  She took the uncomfortable symptoms accompanying cancer and viewed them humorously.  When her operation for brain cancer left a large, zigzagged scar on the top of her bald head she told everyone it was a tattoo.  She said it was a letter"S" and stood for her name.

   The good news is you can develop you own sense of cancer humor.  My classes enjoyed creating cartoons.  There are some basic set captions used in many cartoons.  We used these basic captions and applied them to cancer situations.  Try it for yourself.  Here are some of the answers we came up with.  In capitol letters are the basic captions we used.  In italics are some of the answers we created.

ARE YOU SURE WE ARE ON THE RIGHT ROAD?  (a cancer patient in a hospital corridor begin wheeled to a maternity ward)

YOU WILL NEVER GUESS WHAT I DID TODAY. (an elderly cancer patient in a long, flowing blond wig)

WHAT HAVE I DONE NOW?  (nurse putting IV in the wrong place)

I DON'T KNOW.  I JUST FEEL LUCKY TODAY. (cancer patient being taken first in a doctor's crowded waiting room.)

   Laughter might not literally cure us but humor helps us focus on something besides our pain and promotes a lighter attitude in a heavy situation.