Understanding Why Patients Use Humor When They Talk To Nurses

I work in a neurologist’s office. We try to get really complete histories from every new patient but the patient I was working with, Mr. K, hadn’t checked anything on his intake paperwork. No history of heart disease, no high blood pressure, no cancer scares – not a thing. That’s so rare among our patients (Average Age 78!) that I had to ask him about it.

“Medical history?” He shrugged. “Can’t say there’s much. Of course, I’ve had amnesia as long as I can remember.”

This little grin pushed up the corners of Mr. K’s mouth, and his eyes suddenly started twinkling. I burst out laughing, and so did he. It turns out he did have a little bit of medical history, and he shared that with me after our laugh.

I was dropping off the file when one of the other nurses stopped me. [Read more]

My Pain is Not Like Your Pain!

This comic made me laugh out loud, and I’m guessing that if you work in health care, you laughed too.  There’s no denying that every patient’s pain is real to them. It’s the way that that pain gets reported that can be a source of humor.

How many times, for example, have you had a patient report Level 14 Pain – when you can get them to take a break from the animated conversation they’re having on one phone and text-fest they’re having on another? That patient is almost inevitably followed by a seriously injured person who protests that they’re “Just fine – can I go home now?”  Talking them into having at least a few stitches to keep their innards in the usual places is a job in and of itself.

Humor To Help Keep Perspective

Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Mel Brooks made a critical point with this quote. It’s far easier to find humor in the things that happen to other people than it is to laugh at our own circumstances. Humor experts caution us to keep that in mind, both when we want to laugh at someone else’s situation and when people laugh at ours. Anyone of us could slip in a Pool of Unspecified Origin while en route to the call light – hats off to the nurse who can get up laughing!

Sometimes the humor in a situation is immediately apparent to everyone around us, but we, ourselves, are having a hard time finding the funny. Other emotions – embarrassment, irritation, chargrin – are taking up all of our mental energy.  Given time, however, when those emotions fade away and you have a fresh perspective, things can be funny in retrospect.

It can take a while to get to that perspective.  There was one spectacular mishap in the mid 80′s that I’m still trying to find the funny on…but that’s a story for another time.

How Humor Helps: Pediatric Patients

“You either love working peds or you don’t work peds.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this nursing ‘wisdom’. There’s more than a grain of truth to it: generally nurses who specialize in pediatrics tend to love their work passionately.

However, enjoying what you do doesn’t mean that you don’t have challenges on the job – and if you’ve never attempted to make a bed with one hand, while holding a baby in the other and figuring out dosages by weight in your mind, you don’t know challenging! (And if you can master that, try finding scrubs that don’t show formula stains!)

Luckily, humor can help ease some of the challenges of pediatric nursing. Here are three ways humor helps make life with pediatric patients easier: [Read more]