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3/5/97
COMMENTARY: How I found that humor helps to treat even the worst illnesses
By BRIAN DICKINSON
ABOUT THREE YEARS after ALS had begun to seize control of my body, which is to say in the summer of 1995, we had a visit from two Wisconsin friends, Sig and Mary Gissler.
Sig is the recently retired editor of The Milwaukee Journal and a man with a dry, understated wit. Barbara and I had met up with the Gisslers at journalism gatherings over the years, and had traveled with them on a rousingly memorable 1982 trek through the still-communist states of Eastern Europe. They are fine company: tireless, good-humored and able to size up any new situation with a wry comment precisely on the mark.
The weekend of their visit brought warm sunshine and billowy cumulus clouds. Drought had not yet hammered the lawn. The flower borders shone. Early Sunday afternoon, we convened in the kitchen for sandwiches, and opened all the windows.
Sig and Mary had known of my battle against Lou Gehrig's disease, and so were unsurprised to see me in a wheelchair. They also knew of my feeding tube, a slim latex affair extending from my belly, which had been implanted the previous summer. Both Gisslers are matter-of-fact people, and Mary is a nurse, so I knew that none of my maintenance routine would startle them.
It being lunchtime, my nurse brought over a can of the liquid food that has been my sole sustenance for three years. She pulled up my shirt, drew out the feeding tube and prepared to give me "lunch."
From his chair at the opposite end of the table, Sig watched with mild curiosity as the nurse began the tube feeding. As the nurse pushed the first syringe of nutrient down into the slender, ochre-colored tube, Sig murmured, "Mmmmmm!"
His tone and timing were perfect. I exploded in laughter, uncontrollably, and in an instant all four of us were hooting and carrying on like inebriates after a football victory. The gag, of course, lay in the grand irony that I could taste nothing that I took in through the stomach tube. Neither my exotic method of dining nor my loss of the tasting sense could be considered conventional comic material. Yet, with his barely audible "Mmmmm," Gissler had hit squarely on the whole grotesque nature of my situation - and it was all right.
Actually, our outburst of laughter that day was more than all right. It freed us from the risk of too-somber conversation, of skirting delicately around the unavoidable evidence of my illness. It was an instant tonic. It let us remember that a laugh can be the very best release.
Nurses and doctors may know this instinctively, or they may learn from experience that a hearty laugh can ease the strain of all but the most dire medical situations. After I was diagnosed with ALS (or Lou Gehrig's disease) in December 1992, my family and I had to learn this lesson on our own.
In those first weeks of staggering disbelief, when each of us struggled with the icy fact of a deadly illness in our midst, we would seldom laugh. We were stunned, scared, bewildered. Tears came easily. I recall feeling that the very idea of a guffaw was wildly out of place.
As weeks became months, and we came to see that we might be in for a protracted battle, we began to loosen up. One good friend, Rabbi Leslie Gutterman, enlivened our days by dropping by the house or phoning with his latest jokes. Other friends, knowing well that I faced a precarious future, took to tossing wisecracks my way.
I'd like to share a few with you, but I couldn't remember jokes when I was healthy, and sure don't intend to start now. But I recall that our family soon saw that a good laugh could be the very best way of taking some poison out of our predicament.
By accident, I may have been the first person in our family to signal that a good laugh was nearly always welcome. ALS weakens muscular control over laughing. (It weakens control over crying, too.) What happened, for at least the first year of this malady, is that I would be seized by long spells of riotous, irrepressible laughter. Anything could set me off. Never before had I laughed so loudly and often.
At first, my wife, Barbara, and our three sons, Andy, Jon and Matt, were uneasy at my laughing fits. But we soon realized that the outbursts were harmless. My laughter proved contagious, and after those family laugh-ins we all relaxed.
A good laugh still helps us navigate from day to day, by pushing aside the cold realities of my medical situation. Our team of fine nurses seems especially gifted in this regard; some of them could do a creditable turn on Saturday Night Live. They josh, tease and mimic; they pretend to belittle any concerns that I may show. Most valuably for me, the nurses are able to make light of the prosaic routines and equipment that keep me going.
They - and I - know that medical care is serious business. They don't take chances or cut corners. But a nurse might joke, if a ventilator hose pops loose while I'm being dressed: "Oh. That old thing? You don't really want that back, do you?" And we both get a little laugh. Another nurse will ask me, with mock formality, whether I would prefer cheese or mushrooms in my lunch omelet.
Our sons, so supportive all through this crazy time, have developed their own droll humor for dealing with my illness. "Time to saddle up and get movin'," one of them will say in the morning. Andy, ever the mimic, will come around to my bed of an evening and pretend that he is, by turns, a snooty English butler, a gap-toothed country rustic or a terse-talking New York cabbie. His best line, delivered in an imperious tone when he is impersonating the Count of Something-or-Other, is: "Bring me more hassenpfeffer!" It never fails to amuse.
Brian Dickinson is the Journal-Bulletin's editorial columnist.
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