This elderly man was at home, dying in bed.
He smelled the aroma of his favorite chocolate chip cookies baking.
He wanted one last cookie before he died.
He fell out of bed, crawled to the landing, rolled down the stairs, and crawled into the kitchen where his wife was busily baking cookies.
With waning strength he crawled to the table and was just barely able to lift his withered arm to the cookie sheet.
As he grasped a warm, moist, chocolate chip cookie-his favorite kind-his wife suddenly whacked his hand with a spatula.
“Why?” he whispered. “Why’d you do that?”
“They’re for the funeral,” she replied.
——
“Don’t be surprised if you hear someone crack a joke or two down there (the ED)”, my teacher had told me just before I went down for my placement day. “It’s just how they get by.”
Now in my last year, I’ve had some experience with dark humor and health care. If you want a job where you see people daily in some of the worst conditions imaginable (gun shots, head trauma, car accident, heart attack, stroke, stabbings etc.) and you don’t mind the light banter of dark comedy then the ER is for you! Odd? Horrific? Not really, just very human.
Nurse P and Nurse M, just back from dinner, enter the ER just as a man vomits gray, green stuff all over the floor. Nurse P says off offhandedly as they move to help the man, “I wonder if that cafeteria meatloaf will crawl in here soon and ask for an IV?”
Put human beings in awful situations on a daily basis and, in order to walk through those doors every day, people will find ways to cope.
Also known as gallows humor, it is “a dark or morbid sense of humor unique to people who deal with suffering and tragedy—for example, patients who are terminally ill joking about their illness or death as a means of coping with the illness” (source).
The term comes from “Freud’s (1905) description of prisoner’s making light hearted jokes on the way to the gallows” (Martin, 2007, p 48).
It is used as a method of maintaining one’s sanity in rather dark situations (Martin).
