'Better Laugh at Yourself'

My nurses, doctors and therapists come from Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Iran, Philippines, Mexico, India, China, Korea and Alabama. A rehab facility is a complicated, Hobbesian place, superficially resembling a hospital but more like the crowded locker room of a team refusing to accept it may be facing a losing season. There’s moaning in the night, and bad television, and you witness sullenness, inertia, wisecracking, goofiness, nobility and histrionic good humor. Patients are middle-aged or older, and our caretakers are half our age or younger.  On Saturday a man in a wheelchair was pushed into our group. His left foot had been amputated and the stump was heavily bandaged. He is tall and once was athletic but now sagged in his chair. When our chairs were adjacent I asked how long it had been since he lost the foot. “Nine days.” This was not a man in need of cheerleading, which might earn you a punch in the head.

Some of the nurses and other staff, though never the doctors, have evolved their own jaunty sense of dark humor shared only with a few patients. Some of it would be judged cruel and disrespectful by the needlessly sensitive, but that’s pretty much the definition of intramural humor shared among the members of a group. Every day these people see and do things the rest of us would prefer not to think about, and most, at least while on the job, maintain professional decorum.

In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942), Rebecca West and her husband visit Split in Dalmatia, the site of Diocletian’s palace. They meet an Englishman who teaches English to the locals and has come to think of Split as home. He tells them:

“You evidently don’t understand that here in Split we are very much on parade. We’re not a bit like the Serbs, who don’t care what they do, who laugh and cry when they feel like it, and turn cartwheels in the street if they want exercise. That’s one of the reasons we don’t like the Serbs. To us it seems self-evident that a proud man must guard himself from criticism every moment of the day. That’s what accounts for the most salient characteristic of the Splitchani, which is a self-flaying satirical humour; better laugh at yourself before anybody else has time to do it.”

Today I shared an elevator with the one-footed man. "How you doing, man?  You all right?" he asked, and slapped my shoulder.  

[I have only intermittent internet connectivity and ability to write.]