Having cancer is a daily challenge--but that's why people are able to find the humor in some of the situations and events that intrude upon their lives. Humor can be a defense mechanism and it can also be a power grab. If you can laugh at it, you control at least a small part of it. And that helps.
For example, I just saw the most amazing T-shirt--it stopped me in my tracks. It said,
"Sure they're fake. But my real ones tried to kill me!"
I couldn't help but gasp and then burst out laughing. What unexpected, gallows- humor. And perhaps a release for the marvelous woman wearing the T-shirt. She certainly didn't seem like a "victim" to me.
Miriam Engelberg's wonderfully and sometimes, darkly funny book, "Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics" presents a side of living with cancer that most books gloss over.
Here a two examples of topics covered in an autobiographical, comic book style format. In talking about how personal it is to tell people that she had breast cancer she related through cartoons and words that people stared at her chest trying to figure out which breast was causing the problems. She thought about marketing shirts with an arrow pointing at the guilty breast saying, "Cancer Inside."
My favorite vignette involves someone trying to be philosophical about cancer, life and death by telling her that we are all going to die. After all , any of us could get hit by a bus. Engelberg wonders why it is always a bus? Is there some mad rouge bus out there waiting for all of us? Ironically 15 years before her diagnosis, she really was hit by a bus and lived to tell about it. Her cancer was another story. Given the choice she would rather get hit by a bus again.
As cancer becomes more of a chronic condition it is appropriate that more outlets for expressing humor are developed.
If any of you know of unique, classy and/or humorous ways this topic is explored please let me know.
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