The same skills that help us cope with the night shift from hell and other horrible patient encounters help us to cope with devastating illness in real life. And vice versa. You can find a silver lining almost anywhere, and there are very few burdens that cannot be made a little lighter by laughing at them.
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Coping with cancer is a lot like coping with nursing -- or life, even -- humor helps as does actively seeking the silver lining. Dark humor seems to help the most, or perhaps it's just that I'm hopelessly warped after thirty-odd years of nursing. Whatever, there are people (and I'm related to some) who have no sense of humor, and I cannot imagine how they cope when life throws them a curveball.
Strangely, though, there are people whom never seem to GET thrown the curveball. My sister is one and coincidentally (or maybe not so much) she's completely lacking in sense of humor. (She once stopped speaking to me for YEARS because I laughed when she told me a hysterically funny story about a patient biting the head off her brand new Littman stethoscope. She didn't think it was funny and was furious at me because I LAUGHED at her pain.)
Mom's Alzheimer's is perhaps the first thing that has ever happened to my sister that she couldn't wrestle into submission by sheer force of will. (And it could be argued equally that it's happening to my mother, not my sister or that it's happening to the whole family.)
Back when Mom was in the early stages of her illness, she and I used to laugh about it. The time my sister took Mom to her cousin's wedding, and Mom loudly inquired "Now WHOSE funeral are we at?"
Mom (once everything had been explained to her and she was back in the privacy of her own room) and I both thought it was funny, and for a couple of years we'd tell each other that story, get the giggles and be helpless to STOP giggling. My sister would get mad every time.
Mom is in the late stages of Alzheimer's now, and she doesn't really know me or my sister. The silver lining to that is that I don't have to tell her I have cancer. It would just make her feel bad, and she doesn't know who I am (or why she should care) anyway. Although I'm probably a terrible person for thinking this, it's a silver lining that when Mom gets abusive with the staff of her Memory Unit or loses or dentures or falls, my sister is the one who has to fly halfway across the country to deal with it. I have cancer. I can't travel right now. Two devastating illnesses, two silver linings.
I know that if Mom were herself, she would have laughed herself silly at my shock (and glee) when I ate my first post-operative hot dog and the mustard that fell off went all the way to the napkin on my lap instead of getting stopped front and center by my formerly enormous bosom. Fortunately, I have in-laws with wicked senses of humor. When I whined to Rosita about the breast biopsy that didn't hurt until the 25 pound dog bounced himself off my chest, she sent me, on an official order sheet from the hospital where she works, "doctor's orders" about post biopsy care. "Do not apply dog to chest until two weeks post biopsy." There was a whole page of orders written by Rosita and her co-workers and each one was funnier than the last.
Even though laughing makes my incisions hurt, somehow it makes the pain less and the coping easier. Go figure.
