Laughing My Way Through a Crisis: The Power of Humor

There is a healing power in humor.  I have experienced it from two different vantage points and hope it will be a key element in my battle to confront amyloidosis.

My son Nathan holding Melissa, Bryan and Sarah

I owe my first big lesson to a pair of blind people in the most difficult of circumstances.

It was October of 1988.  On Oct. 7 in the very early morning my wife had given birth to triplets---two girls and a boy---born six weeks early.  I didn’t realize this miracle would come with such a mixed bag of experiences going forward.

Because they were early, each of the kids took their times growing and getting to the point of coming home.  On a personal level, after taking two weeks off for the birth, I had come back to work as the managing editor of a small Upstate New York daily newspaper only to be let go the day I came back.

But life goes on and while we may not navigate every difficult situation well, we press ahead doing the best we can.  Near the end of the month all of the kids had come home for a day, before more trouble came up.

One of the girls, Sarah, was not breathing well.  I took her to the local emergency room and was blessed---a term I used without embarrassment---that the pediatrician who came to attend her was skilled in her unique case, acted to stabilize her as much as possible, and then began to make plans for her to go to a higher level neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) about 80 miles away in Syracuse.

By the time, she was ready for transport it was probably 10:30 p.m.  In my scramble to accompany my child I too was poorly prepared.  A gracious LDS missionary gave me money for the toll roads and I drove my old station wagon onto the Thruway to find another challenge.  My alternator was dead and my battery died each time I turned on lights or the radio.

Borrowing something I had seen in my days as a missionary in Uruguay South America, I took the whacky tact of driving without lights as much as possible, borrowing light from other cars on the highway to make it to Syracuse and Upstate Medical Center, minutes after my daughter.

Emotionally strung out---as a crisis can cause---I then went to the waiting room of that NICU and waited as doctors worked to address my daughter’s health concerns.  I was blessed in that room to sit next to two blind people.

In engaging with me in conversation they spoke of humor and its importance in dealing with crisis and its medicinal power.  They not only shared the lesson, they began to share stories and to laugh with great enthusiasm at each funny tale.  One I still remember more than two decades later.  On a train to Philadelphia, one told of going back to the bathroom on a train, or at least they assumed the bathroom was there.

The humor lifted the dark cloud and allowed me to smile, feel light hearted for a moment, and to be more energized.  It was a key lesson at a critical time.

Years later, in moving my family from New York to Utah, I found the need to add to that chapter in Iowa, when a man crossed the median in front of the van I was driving and hit me head on.  He died instantly, and by all police accounts I should have too.  However, with miracles from heaven, my badly beaten up body, two broken femurs, two mangled lower legs, every rib broken from a steering wheel that wrapped around my chest, and a punctured lung, among other injuries later, I was cut out of the vehicle by the Jaws of Life and flown by helicopter to a Des Moines Hospital.  Doctors did their best to piece me together.

Fixing the body is one thing, fixing the spirit quite another.  Surrounded by love, faith and some timely humor, I began the slow miracle back one hour, one test and one day at a time.  Legs that would never be able to walk again now walk and function.  My body was pieced back together.

Thanks to more important things, my spirit was revived as well.

I hope I find plenty to cause me to laugh as I now embark on a journey that will require me to slow things down to one test, one day, or one issue at a time.  I am sure there are unpleasant hurdles in front of me.  It is a road I know.  I hope to smile and laugh along the road often.