Funeral homes often have to transport long distances. I know someone driving a hearse who fell asleep along the interstate and rolled. The first responders were relieved to discover that one of the occupants needed no urgent attention.
tl;dr: You should quit.
see also:
yes, iām busy. thatās why i hadnāt taken the time to sign up for an account until now. but this post is so off-base that it inspired me.
as for āfake physician,ā if i were making it up to self-aggrandize, iād think of something more glamorous. if i were making it up to shame the author effectively, iād say i was a friend of the dead.
so, no, itās nothing that excitingā¦ just someone who works around families of sick people and has learned (the hard way sometimes) that things like this post can be more hurtful than you might guess if you hadnāt had the experience.
as a personal tip to you, mtdna, itās useful to try to figure out what the poster had to gain by his post. in the case of my post, it should seem obvious iām not trying to make myself bigā¦ i just have an opinion about the subject matter. and now that (i hope) you believe iām a physician (and, btw, i said family, tooā¦ iām also a person who has suffered through death/dying), you might take the time to wonder if thereās something to be gained by listening.
i hope you wonāt learn about how painful it is to have someone you love die first-hand, but i suspect you will, in time. when that happens, i hope your feelings are dealt with respectfully.
yeah, see my above post.
to elaborate on what you ellipsed out, my parent died recently of cancer. i helped her go to the bathroom and bathe when she was horrifically disabled and i dealt significantly with her corpse. it was terribly difficult for her and for me, even though iāve dealt with it before (yeahā¦ sorryā¦ as a physician).
tl;dr: hesitate before hitting the reply button.
Yep. i too have wiped my moms ass as she died of ovarian cancer. It gives me no privilege to harangue others about my preferences and try to shame them. Please, be well, and go outside for a while, and take your own word for the very best in advice. I had crankyjerkitis at the time, too.
tl;dr: Please, follow your own advice.
My grandfather told me that joke; so I told it at his funeral. There wasnāt a dry eye in the house!
For those of you arriving late:
āSo, there was this funeral procession walking out of a church in San Francisco. One of the six pall bearers stumbled on his shoe laces and the coffin tipped forward. The coffin slid down the steep church stairs and continued to slide down one of the steep San Francisco streets. At the bottom of the hill the coffin went sliding through the front door of a pharmacy, slid all the way back to the pharmacy counter and came to a stop as it ran into the pharmacy counter. At that point, the coffin door flew open and the corpse popped up and said, Hey doc, got something to stop this coffin?ā
What they really need are Cultural Marxists!
At the same funeral, I got to turn the crank to lower my grandfather in his casket. Well, prior to the funeral. Post wake. Anyway. After several few turns of the screw, I noticed that only one side was going down. I stopped, but couldnāt really find the words to explain what was wrong, and my dad prodded me to continue. I kept turning, and as one side kept getting lower and lower, my grandfathers hands started to unclasp, and I had visions of the entire bottom of the casket dropping out and rolling him onto the floor. A couple more turns though, and it all leveled out. Just as well.
At my uncleās funeral (same side of the family, 10 years earlier) I commented to my father that I had never seen a woman throw herself on the casket crying āno! no! donāt take him from me!ā except in the movies. A few minutes later his widow came over and said to me āIf it would make you feel better, I could do that.ā I declined.
Perhaps foolishly. Still havenāt seen it.
āWe found it was easier to just switch the heads!ā
Iāll be here all week, folks ā try the RSS feed! Donāt forget to tip our servers! And if you see that Luck Dragon, remind him that he owes me a fiver!
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i will take your advice at its word, and i will think twice about replying now. and iāll try to get outside more.
iāll also probably unsubscribe. as you point out, this does make me cranky. iāll just finally point out one more time, though, that getting a giggle out of someoneās family member falling out of a hearse can come at the expense of others, most of whom probably donāt take the time to post about it.
It should, man. Thatās why I wonder why i know that youāre a doctor who suffered a recent loss.
Is it relevant? Or embiggening!?
I mean no harm, but youāve come in with a wagging finger.
ALL of whom have a functioning scroll bar, and need no paladin.
FWIW, I hope you come back.
well, i guess i have to acknowledge the point that you feel it looks embiggening (ha). i will try to learn from that. it seemed more data-based than leading with stories from personal experience, which is why i mentioned my job.
i spend my days around patients and their families. iāve seen people respond to this hardship in lots of ways, some of which were very different from how i did when i was in their situation. iāve learned (unfortunately many times when i unintentionally said something that they found hurtful) that around sickness and death there is an emotional minefield that shouldnāt be taken lightly. iāve received some good advice/criticism from more experienced clinicians who care about these topics. my hope is that my advice/criticism (which was directed at the boingboing editors/primary authors, who should be able to take it) will be heard by them.
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Elaborate cosplay of Mother, Jugs & Speed?
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For the record:
Bad Taste > No Taste > Good Taste
On this, the editors, whose tastes differ widely, remain in general agreement.
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Right on. And agreed. I donāt take the emotional minefield all that lightly. Humor helps, right? What I may advocate for here would not be appropriate in many other settings, including clinical ones which I wager you spend a lot more time in than I do. And thank you for that, by the way. Tough job. Also, hugs man.
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Speaking of which, 2:33s
http://www.nerdist.com/vepisode/weird-al-yankovic-gets-tacky-with-pharrells-happy/
A good way to look at this is that all people suffer from death. It truly is the one thing we canāt avoid (as we know that you can be super sneaky/rich/connected and avoid most taxes). People arenāt laughing at this individual familyās suffering, but rather trying to see some dark humor in death itself (to use a metaphor, trying to light a candle in the vast darkness). People are laughing at the strangeness/absurdity of a corpse on a gurney rolling about in traffic, not at the suffering of one individual or making light of a familyās suffering.
I might add that if a recent patient death has left you as a physician unable to see any humor in this, you may need to discuss the event with grief counselors etcā¦ (fuck, weāve got them in the veterinary world, so you human docs must have a much larger support structure than we doā¦). Doctors are some of the most morbid m-fers that I personally know. Donāt even get me started on a coroner that I know.
Not all death is personal to everyone. The fact that you seem to be taking this personally may be a professional concernā¦ I know, armchair analysis by a non-mental health professional, butā¦
There are some truths in what you say. But youāre missing a point: this personās friends/family are going through this right now and know that itās on the news. I hope that they are able to find humor in it, but I wouldnāt feel comfortable assuming that they do.
Iām able to find a laugh in sickness/death. I have laughed with friends, family, and patients in their hard times, and itās been helpful to me and them. But i let them choose the mood that helps them the most. In the situation where iām doing the grieving, itās my turn to choose. And sometimes I choose to laugh.
Iām not sure being concerned about the emotional health of the family of the dead guy is ātaking this personally.ā except in the more abstract sense that my personal experience has informed what i imagine other people are going through.
Therapy: yes, I have found it helpful for my grieving. but i donāt think itās going to change my memory of the pain i felt. or what i know was helpful to me in the darkest times.
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