Yesterday I spent several hours reading brain tumor blogs of all sorts of different shapes, sizes and concerns.
Strangely enough, one constant theme that appeared in many of my favorite blogs was humor. It could be silly humor, crazy humor, gallows humor, black humor, blue humor (i.e. lots of swearing) or any other color of humor you can imagine..
Sometimes blogsters talked about brain tumors as being “funny”, like Cancer is SO FUNNY by Amy Marash (http://cancerissofunny.blogspot.com/), or funny as in Funnycancershirts.com (http://www.funnycancershirts.com/) by Ryan Armbrust, but to me these are all playing in the same emotional sandbox.
Is laughing good for those of us battling brain tumors?
Well Joni Gatz-Bauma, my new-found Brain Store buddy just introduced me to a bunch of organizations that not only believe humor is therapeutic, they promote humor as therapy. How can you tell? Just visit their websites. For starters check out the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (http://www.aath.org/). (Their website looks to be in the middle of a major surgery itself, so be warned that there’s a number of pages that aren’t fully operational.)
Of course instead of being happy, I’m now honked off that I missed their annual conference which was right here in Chicago in April (their 2013 conference is in San Diego).
On the AATH site there’s also a list of organizational “friends” on their website that seem to buy into this idea, from Caring Clowns International to Cancer Treatment Centers of America. See http://www.aath.org/aath-organizational-friends-listing
My next posting will feature a youtube.com video from the AATH annual conference of funny nurses. Wait, that doesn’t sound exactly right. I mean nurses who find their jobs funny. Umm, maybe I should say its nurses who find their patients funny. No, that sounds rather cruel. Ok, just look for my next post and make up your own mind.
