My “diagnosis,” as it is called in the chronic disease biz, came on my 27th birthday. That was a Thursday. I had let my boss know that I would be out for the remainder of the week. I phrased it to him that my shoulder problem was going to require a series of steroid treatments, Thursday through Saturday, but that I should be okay to work again on Monday. That was the truth, just not the whole truth.
My mother took me to the Friday treatment which was in the same room as the first one the day before. She sat right next to me and we talked and laughed together as we waited for the bag to drip its contents into me. We joked about squeezing the bag to speed up the process and got laughing at the idea that that could cause my hand to inflate like a balloon and then it would be hard to deny to the nurse that we had “squeezed.” My mother can always get me laughing, intentionally and not, but either way we get ourselves going.
In fact my whole family is that way. Our strong and wacky senses of humor are so perfectly tuned that we can just collapse each other to the floor in fits of laughter while any unfortunate bystander is left perplexed, if not a bit concerned for our well-being, off to the side. The bystanders often include various spouses, assorted aunts and uncles, unlucky enough to have married into the family and too late in their adult development to hope to get in on the jokes. But blood relatives, like my aunt on my father’s side, shares the exact humor as I, my brother, and my father do – sharp-tongued wit, even a bit cruel to the uninitiated, with a good dollop of silly thrown in. Perhaps a bit of it is in the genes. The humor I share with my mother is a bit different. Usually based on making fun of each other, laughing at something one of us did or said, not necessarily meant to be funny, but seen in a certain family light, hysterical.
Like when we had arrived that day, my mother announced to the front desk that I was the “10:00 drip.” Now, had I not been standing next to her, and had I not nearly wet my pants at that, I am not sure either she or the nurse would have caught the humor. And then, for the rest of the drip-session, everyone who entered was the “10:15 drip” or the “11:48 drip.” One arrival, who seemed to know everyone in the room and all the nurses, and even had a reserved chair for herself, was, of course, “the automatic drip.” It just never got old.
