Deana Hendrickson (inset top) and her late mother Rita Stein (inset bottom) used gallows humor like this staged "mercy killing" as a way to deal with Rita's stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis. "It lightened her last days," Hendrickson said.

The pair also got in trouble for cracking up in the waiting room before her mom’s first radiation treatment.

“She turned to me and said, ‘What’s the worst that can happen? I’ll get cancer?’ and we couldn’t stop laughing,” said Hendrickson, who now advocates for lung cancer patients. “People were shooting daggers at us but one woman came up and said, ‘Don’t pay any attention. You just made my year.’”

Cancer, Hendrickson said, somehow “freed” her mom.

“There were plenty of times when she was really sick and wasn’t in any shape to be funny, but if she was feeling just a little bit better, she would absolutely joke around,” she said. “My mom had a terrible childhood and I think she just learned to look at the world that way. She was always a character and became more of a character after her diagnosis.”

I suppose the same could be said for many of us.

Cancer is the gift that keeps on giving whether you’re talking physical or emotional pain, debilitating side effects, abject grief – or, great new material to entertain your family and friends. And as we all know, there’s much to mock, from those brutal, open-backed patient gowns to the tragically flawed health care system to cancer drugs that all sound like characters out of Game of Thrones (“One day, Taxotere, you will be king!”).

But yucking it up can also go too far. I’ve come home from get-togethers with non-cancer friends drained from trying to make everybody comfortable by turning my cancer into a stand-up comedy routine.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who falls into this trap.

“I think humor is a great coping mechanism, but it can also be a way to push away the serious,” said Leslie Heron, a nurse practitioner with the Fred Hutch Survivorship Program at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. “Some people are so jovial that others don’t know they need support. I don’t have any problem with people using humor as long as they’re able to accept help or support as they need it.”

Using humor to heal

Wisecracking through cancer is loaded territory, to be sure. But for me, it helps. It helps to see Facebook posts of women going off to chemo wearing Viking outfits. It helps to watch parody videos like #BaldSoHard and see a grown man in a pink tutu dancing across the U.S. and the Internet on behalf of women and men with breast cancer. For me, it’s healthy – it’s healing – to be irreverent and snotty and silly and, at times, joyfully absurd.

Because I know one day I may be in Thelma’s shoes and find myself lying on a hospital bed with a doctor in a white coat hovering over me, solemnly delivering some very big, bad news.

Cancer’s funny that way.

So like my mom’s friend, I’m going to continue to crack wise. And take potshots. And dream of dancing even when I can’t walk. I’m going to keep asking cancer, in the immortal words of Thelma, to kindly pull my finger.

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