Black humor as a magic word

Like every neighbor's daughter, I have spent some difficult days in a hospital.

The needles did not hit my veins, but my father's.

I learned a lot in the ER.

About deterioration and the baroque proximity to death, but also about strategies to hide dark ruminations and to survive in those places with a professionalism that is neither violent nor indifferent.

Patients cope with their anguish: they look down on themselves as if their body did not belong to them, they observe others feeling healthier, they play jokes and black humor is a magic word to deceive fear.

My father, like myself when I have gone to some consultations, acted friendly with guards and nurses, and activated a capacity for linguistic jokes that would earn him a chair in the RAE: he seeks a mimesis between reality, signifier and meaning that annuls the

Sausserian

arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and justifies any inclusive attempt of language.

My father asserts that the logical, rational and correct thing would be to say “I'm on my feet”, instead of “I'm standing”: only people with only one leg place a single foot on the ground.

We bipedal beings - or still bipeds - rise in the plural.

From this naturalistic approach to morphology, in Urgencias, my father analyzes the need to reserve the word “patient” for those who raise the Eiffel Tower with matches or cook a shank for hours at a low temperature;

The term patient

would be more appropriate for the emergency population

.

The desire to smile, to escape, blurs the fact that they have connected you to oxygen, it hurts and you hear the screams of a man with low potassium.

A girl vomits after trying to commit suicide by swallowing a box of paracetamols - ouch - and uses her cell phone to broadcast her condition live...

More information

Genocide, background noise, business model

As Eugenio stated or Lenny Bruce demonstrated day after day, humor is born from a mass of unbearable pains.

It is a way, simultaneously cruel and soothing, of facing the wound.

Pain is violence and laughter sometimes exaggerates that violence until it becomes ridiculous, while, at other times, a sense of humor is a form of decorum, generous and distant - no less profound - that contains anger and fear. , loneliness, the perception of the asymmetries experienced when the body punishes you - you, very particularly you -, but these punishments constitute a routine for those who care for you.

Sometimes superhuman kindness emerges, but whoever takes care of you cannot fully empathize with you and the person next to you, because that dedication would make them lose their minds and perspective: the laughter of the MIRs who review their lessons in the pits or the detachment from surgeons in a film like

MASH

- it has not aged well - illustrate the opposite pole of the self-destructive abyss of Andrés Hurtado, the doctor who is the protagonist of

The Tree of Science

, which marked my adolescent understanding of literature.

Esther Lucas worked as a volunteer nurse.

The magic mountain.

Television:

Dr. Gannon

,

ER

,

Grey's Anatomy

,

The Good Doctor

,

House

... In the sentimental spectacularization of American private healthcare there is a political justification;

also a recognizable masochistic gloating in series focused on public areas such as our

central Hospital

.

Or perhaps they are procedures to develop the membrane of habit.

Beyond the eternal satire against doctors that talks about fear, gnashing of teeth and criticism of the monetization of health, today I do not have enough poems to express my immense gratitude towards public health professionals.

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