Humor and healing: Amid medical uncertainty, lighter moments are more than welcome

By Dan Wascoe:
“Oops” is not what a patient expects from a hospital nurse fixing to administer a pain-relieving treatment.
In my case she simply had squeezed an extra gob of ointment from a slippery tube. No harm, no foul. Just a tension-relieving chuckle.

Three decades ago this year, writer and editor Norman Cousins wrote of his belief that his own self-prescriptive medicine plus a positive attitude and belly laughs courtesy of  Marx Brothers films helped him beat doctors’ predictions of an early demise from a rare arthritis-related ailment called ankylosing spondylitis.
During most of my 69 years, I had little reason or opportunity to even think about his thesis. That changed this summer. I spent a couple weeks in two hospitals with a relatively rare condition called Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Rogue antibodies began chewing the lining of nerves that linked my brain with my muscles. The condition can incapacitate its victims for months, even years. I also was told, pointedly, that it can kill...Continue reading...