Black Humour

Farawyn · Apr 13, 2015

I'm still not over George Carlin, though. :arghh:

OrganizedChaos, LVN · Apr 13, 2015

We had a patient in the isolation room right outside the nurses' station who had no legs. He was confused and had MRSA of a wound and was calling out WHOA! WHOA! WHOA! all night long. We kept going in there to see what he wanted, and he pretended to be surprised, that he wasn't screaming.
Finally, my friend Mary, who was really dry, gets on his room intercom and says in almost a monotone: "This is the voice of God. If you don't stop yelling I am going to strike you dead."
Not a peep for the rest of the night.

That has me cracking up! That's awesome. Lol!

No Stars In My Eyes · Apr 13, 2015

I hope if I 'die funny' people WILL laugh. I enjoy making people laugh!

lovinglife2015 · Apr 13, 2015

I hope if I 'die funny' people WILL laugh. I enjoy making people laugh!

Well sure. Darwin award worthy deaths deserve a chuckle.

OrganizedChaos, LVN · Apr 13, 2015

I have to share this story. I wasn't at my grandfather's funeral but my mom (her father) was.

So her cousin wasn't really all with it. It was close to my grandfather's birthday, she was really upset she didn't get to give him her card. So at the funeral she put the card in his casket. My mom's cousin gets there & then starts looking in the casket for the card. Not the looking, DIGGING!! So my mom gets up, helps her & all of a sudden the casket slides off & shuts on them!! They get everything fixed, they find the card & my mom puts it between her father's hands.

Yes, it really happened.

ixchel · Apr 13, 2015

I however do not feel comfortable laughing at another family's suffering/death, I draw the line there.

No one is laughing AT SUFFERING. Good grief. You don't get it. It's fine that you don't get it. But don't twist it into something it's not. Part of a situation might be quirky, silly, reminiscent to something else that was funny, and THAT is what makes us laugh. We're not laughing at suffering.

ixchel · Apr 13, 2015

Here ya go, you twisted weirdos.

ZeFrank is flippin' hilarious. Be sure to check out his True Facts About Morgan Freeman.

Farawyn · Apr 13, 2015

I have to share this story. I wasn't at my grandfather's funeral but my mom (her father) was.
So her cousin wasn't really all with it. It was close to my grandfather's birthday, she was really upset she didn't get to give him her card. So at the funeral she put the card in his casket. My mom's cousin gets there & then starts looking in the casket for the card. Not the looking, DIGGING!! So my mom gets up, helps her & all of a sudden the casket slides off & shuts on them!! They get everything fixed, they find the card & my mom puts it between her father's hands.
Yes, it really happened.

OMG!!!

My grandfather was a depressed alcoholic. For years my parents and my aunts and uncles tried to get him help, and he died sad and alone, when he didn't have to.

Well, at the wake, my uncles slid some cans of beer into his casket as a nod to that.

At the funeral, the Priest starts talking, and he says, "Howard was buried with what he loved best...'

*snickers ensue in the pews*

"...the ROSARY."

I swear my uncle almost wet himself.

heron, ASN, RN · Apr 13, 2015

@lovinglife2015:

Pomposity does not equal reverence.

You certainly have a right to an opinion ... and I have a right to my opinion that your justification for castigating those who cope differently than you is pretty flawed, starting with your fuzzy notion of what compassion really is.

"Some people"? Really? Some people can smell a phoney from a mile away, too. Go ahead and do what you do to cope and share that here. Tell us what makes you laugh at work. But let Mother Superior tend to her own cloister and leave us alone, m'kay?

Farawyn · Apr 13, 2015

We need a *facepalm* smiley.

Elvish, BSN, DNP, RN, NP · Apr 13, 2015

I KNOW for a fact that there were LTC nurses in two states who threw a party the day my grandpa died. He got kicked out of several places for trying to pay the older ladies for sexual favors, making passes at the staff, and calling the City PD/Sheriff/SBI/FBI because he was certain he knew a) where Chandra Levy was, and b) that there was a terrorist training camp in his home county in Alabama (Alabama that he hadn't visited in 20 years). I hope they did whatever they had to do to deal with him when he was alive.

I loved my grandpa and have good memories of him, but he could be an ornery SOB pre-Alzheimers on a good day. He died two days before my brother graduated from boot camp, which forced a lot of people to choose between a funeral and a graduation. Some of us chose one, some of us chose the other. To a person, all of us thought, "You're still making things as difficult as you possibly can, aren't you!"

Grandpa was dead. He had already gone on to wherever he was going to eat all the walnuts and chocolate ice cream he wanted. No one's twisted humor was going to hurt him.

lovinglife2015 · Apr 13, 2015

@lovinglife2015, as well as the other poster that finds gallows humor so very deplorable:
Compassion is the ability and the choice to accept others' defects because I know that it's only sheer chance - luck, if you will - that I'm not exactly the same as them. It's got nothing to do with one's feelings, false solemnity (aka pomposity) or the size of the stick in one's nethers.
If gallows humor as a coping mechanism makes you wince, leave the situation in which you find it. It obviously doesn't work for you. But if you insist on admonishing those for whom it does work, then you need only glance in the mirror to see what true lack of compassion looks like.

Compassion is having empathy and kindness for others that are suffering, not laughing at their expense because you're too immature to process grief or sadness or even neutrality because often times, you may feel no emotional connection to a patient. Having the maturity to treat that body with the respect that you would treat your own child is the least that you can do.