Laugh or Die

I write, tho no one’s reading.  And that’s o.k.  I still get to write.

I was e-mailing an old chum today (Mac) and was reminded of a time I laughed…too much I guess.

For my part, I’m still waiting to grow up, but suppose I never fully will.  I guess I’m kinda-sorta ‘always waiting to die’ in the farthest recesses of my mind.  My toe has been on that line and I think it fuels my behavior.  For years I was treated for Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and was really not expected to live, so it was a 3 1/2 year ritual of needles and puke and pain and then…aaa, maybe you die anyway kid. I daresay growing up like that changes you.  Coming out of that “normal” would be like coming out of other traumatic fights as if nothing ever happened.  Aint gonna happen, boys.  Anyway, I am much like a child who won’t go to bed because they don’t want to miss anything – – I’m always the last one to fall asleep at the slumber party. Being all grown up I don’t have the occasion to attend slumber parties any more and I think that’s a total gyp man! Youth is a wonderful thing.  What a shame to waste it on children!!  (O.K, I just ripped off George Bernard Shaw, but I admitted it, so it’s all good.)   Here is an example of my dedication to fun: Once, as a teen, I had to be taken to the hospital with exhaustion because I physically could not walk.  It scared my mother to death.  I had gone to a slumber party, staggered home the next day and collapsed in my bed.  When I tried to get up, I could not.  Not only was I incapable of standing on my own, all I could do was cry rivers.  Cry, cry, cry and mumble, “What’s wrong with me?”  So off we went to my pediatric oncologists office.  I sat there weeping like a freak – mind you, I’m the kid who wrote English papers while they were extracting bone marrow from my backside.  With the pain tolerance of a mule and the disposition of Hawkeye from MASH, I was the ever joking, sarcastic, tough as nuts chemo patient.  So, Dr. Pecoraro asked me what I’d been up to.  I, between sobs, told him that I’d been at a slumber party the night before.  I ate Nacho Cheese Dorito’s (NEW back then), & orange sody pop.  Gee, maybe I was trying to kill the cancer with some combination of red dye #2 and yellow #3…..Anyway, tho not the preferred diet of a cancer patient, one night of evil orange foods certainly could not be the culprit.  I confessed to staying up until 3 or 4 and laughing a LOT.  He grilled me on this, and as I began to regale him my evening I started laughing again, rather uncontrollably, but I was also still crying, so then I was laugh-crying and my gawd, what a side show!  He took a moment and looked at my mother then at me and said, “You’re suffering from exhaustion.  Plain and simple.  Get home and get in bed.  Do not get up for at least two days, otherwise we’ll have to hospitalize you.”  The exhaustion was caused by laughter and lack of sleep. But mostly laughter. I had cackled myself sick!!   Do you know how many hours you have to laugh for that to happen?  Many many many.  And here’s something scary.  I have a cassette tape from portions of that evening to help me remember.  It’s a tonic like no other.  I put that tape in, take a listen, and suddenly I’m 15 again – my friends and I and our littler voices, innocent and goofy and sublimely unaware that we would probably never laugh like that again.  We thought we were so funny, we cracked ourselves up at every turn – singing to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack and doing ridiculous dances to make each other laugh.  I have a similar tape which I made when I was actually in the hospital.  I carried my tape recorder everywhere with me. The hospital tape is, listening back, so sad.  I was sick-dog-sick with cancer and pneumonia on top of it, yet I was sharing a room with another teenage girl and in the middle of the night we were whooping it up like drunks!  You can hear my wheezing as I’m laughing, you can hear my I.V. dripping/clicking in the background.  The first time I heard that noise on one of my hospital tapes after I’d long been cured, I almost threw up.  That tick tick tick of my I.V., sliding poison into my veins, gave me a physical reaction to a psychological trauma.  Even writing this I’m feeling sick.  After you dry heave a few thousand times your body never forgets and old sounds/medicinal smells can bring it smack right back atcha.  Yick.  Double yick.  Anyway, the nurses had to come in and tell us to shut up numerous times, but after spending hundreds of hours in hospitals as an adult, I can only imagine how laughter coming from our room was perhaps so refreshing for those nurses.  Not only that, now I know  laughter was probably theeee best upper respiratory therapy in the world!  They’d come in and beat on my back every few hours, but my raucous laughter couldn’t have hurt that congestion any.

So I’ll make a point.  I think everyone should be taken to the hospital and diagnosed with “laughter” at least once in their lives. I had a great doctor, saints as nurses, and they threw every toxic chemical in the book into my veins, but if I had to put my money on the thing that cured me the most, I’d have to say it was laughter.  Studies now show it actually changes your blood for the better – but I could have told them that in 1977.  Not to be naive, but I believe laughter chased cancer right outta me.  For cancer is evil, and it could not abide in such a happy place.  My challenge as a ‘grown up’ is to manage to find enuf laughter to make all the woe’s go away.  And damn it, sometimes I just can’t.  This quest for fun gets in the way of being a grown up…No, being a grown up get’s in the way of laughing my ass off all night.  That’s what it is.  So “Middle Age” – get the fuck out-my-way.  Laughter calls.