People often comment on the black humour of the medical profession, nurses, perhaps are renown for their dark jokes. Playing on the humour of situations which definately don’t have humour in them. A little while ago IÂ was involved in the treatment of a young person who had attempted suicide. One of the side effects of oxygen starvation is combative behaviour – and this poor boy was severely oxygen starved. The crew who brought him in were soaked in sweat from having to hold him down in the ambulance. When he arrived it took about 8 members of staff to hold him down, since he was no longer strapped to the ambulance trolley. He made gutteral noises that no human should make.
Sedation brought him to the point where the 8 or so of us weren’t struggling quite so much to keep him on the bed. Finally anasthetic drugs sent him to sleep, and he was taken to CT to find out what damage he may have done to himself. During that whole process, indeed, until IÂ left work and started the long drive home I didn’t really let myself contemplate the waste of a life. During that recusitation process I made some mild-but-good humoured comments – once he was anesthetised, quietly joking with the drenched paramedic/technician that I didn’t know what all the trouble was about…he was calm enough now. And we gently laughed.
It’s a way of dealing with the undealable. Of coping with things which you’re really not meant to have to cope with. Of seeing someone much younger than me destroyed. Looking and seeing signs that there may have been some quiet self-harming going on. Of not touching his pain because it’s raw and dangerous.
But once it was all done, once he went off to be scanned, and you’re picking up the detritus; sorting out the bay so the next unfortunate soul can come in and be cared for; that’s when the dark humour no longer holds. To an outsider watching the medical care – it may have looked uncaring, possibly even unprofessional to have joked about his serious condition, but watching me curling up with Kathryn on the sofa, actually having alcohol (pretty rare that IÂ come home and think – ‘actually, no, IÂ want a drink’) then it’d be pretty obvious that yes, I do care.
But until IÂ left that place, until my shift was done, I used that dark, dark humour to keep those dark ghosts away.
