The other night I was watching the TV
show New Amsterdam. It’s a somewhat
different hospital show where the Hospital director is fighting throat cancer
while trying to run one of the biggest hospitals in the US. There are a number of scenes where he hangs
out with regulars in the cancer ward while they all get their chemo
treatments. This particular show they
were renaming musicals as if they were cancer based. I was too busy laughing to remember them all
but two that I do were Croaklahoma and Mucus Man.
It reminded me of my twice a week
visits to the outpatient cancer center where I would go to get my chemo and
blood. Picture a large room with 20-30
lounge chairs filled with people of all ages/sex/race. Without patients the place looks like a
Lazy-Boy show room. The nurses had
their standard set of questions they would ask when you were settling in. To tee up the relationship for the next 8
hours I would try to find creative ways to answer them.
Nurse: “Have you fallen in the last 12 months?”
Response: “Only in Love”.
Nurse: “Do you have any fear of physical or sexual
abuse at home?”
Response: “Not in the last week”
Nurse: “Can I get you something to drink”
Response: “A different bag of blood, this one doesn’t
taste good”
Response: “Bourbon on the rocks”
I once had a pretty young nurse who
was all business. When she asked if she
could get me anything. I figured I’d
lighten things up and asked for a kiss.
She looked me straight in the eye and said “I’ll get you another bag of
chemo.”.
They say keeping a sense of humor in
the tough times is good medicine.
Certainly making jokes about cancer and death would seem inappropriate,
but for the patients in the middle of treatment it is way to deal with the stress. When I was in treatment, I use to make
jokes about “kicking the bucket”. I
thought they were hilarious, Pam was not impressed.
In a lot of instances, I find that
humor can take the stress out of an otherwise intense situation. It was definitely true in business and
somewhat true in fighting cancer. Typically
there’s nothing funny about cancer but when you are in the middle of treatment
(and even afterwards) the absurdity of the situations you face can be rather
humorous. There was nothing humorous about having a catheter
until I realized you can drink all you want and never have to miss a minute of
a football game rushing to the bathroom.
You can find an upside to almost everything if you look hard enough.
I think this carries over to every
day normal life as well. It’s easy to
get caught up in the little challenges we face and turn them into big issues
that look overwhelming. Trying to get back to running certainly falls
into that category. Discovering a way to
put things in perspective helps me to take some of stress out of the situation. One trip to a pediatric cancer ward has a
way of putting all my challenges in perspective. That, and a bit of self-deprecating humor
goes a long way towards my mental stability (or at least my perceived
stability).
I love the Humphrey Bogart quote from
the movie “The African Queen”. “Things
are never so bad that they can’t be made worse”.
