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This blog is another opportunity to feel grateful. Thank you, dear Universe, you continue to bless me with recovery and health.
As the idiom goes, all work and no play make Jack a dull boy. My name may not be Jack, but I do get called a serious man by my friends.
Everyone’s life needs some timely doses of humour and laughter.
I see people who have the talent for being humorous. It leaves me wondering if there is a vaccine or another injection that I can take too. For instance, I heard an anecdote about a boxing match. It was in 1974 between the Olympic medal-winning boxer and the then-heavyweight champion.
You guessed it right! Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
Ali found it funny that Foreman could not land a knockout punch. He kept joking with Foreman and repeatedly asked him “That’s all you got?”
After getting to know about my rare disease and chronic ailments, I looked for ways. Ways that could lighten up my dreary situation. Pondering over humour led me to explore Laughter Therapy. It helped me infuse the necessary levity into my life.
Post getting a diagnosis, I took all kinds of medicines and therapies. I even tried alternative therapies in the hope of achieving holistic healing. But I found that laughter therapy helped me stay calm, even when circumstances were tense.
This therapy may well be considered the underdog but in my arsenal of treatments, it was very useful. I wanted to find a successful cure, and I wanted to do it with a smile and lots of laughter.
Being able to laugh through my situation made me feel more positive. It helped me enjoy social interactions and leisure activities like playing table tennis.
It became mandatory for me to control my stress levels for the treatments to work in my favour. It was stress that was negatively impacting my emotional equilibrium. It made my body weight, diabetes and blood sugar even worse. My immune system and mood swings had strong relations with intense stress levels.
In those times, it was a dose of laughter that encouraged productivity and self-esteem. I was able to digest food – and life – better. Vital signs improved with my body producing more happiness hormones. Every part of me seemed to agree with this state of mind!
Along this journey into humour, I recognized that, as adults, we only go about life activities with focus and purpose. To break this mould, I felt we need to think about laughter as Kidults. Reawaken the kids within us.
Talk gibberish, let us loose, watch cartoons, etc. Activities that simply allow us to relax and relieve our stress.
I also discovered that applying humour prescription helped my ageing father to heal. Age was no limit to being a child all over again. Living in a smart world is always helpful. One no longer needs to look for Cartoon Network on TV. OTT platforms like YouTube and Netflix have ready supply doses of kiddish entertainment.
While Internet media keeps us entertained, we still need to find ways to remain motivated. Having people around to add a dash of humour can substitute for elevating your spirits. Sometimes, all it takes is reliving a hilarious memory together for the laughs to break out. With families and close friends, such moments are legion if the people are still around to share them. The sheer gratitude for such a company gave me reason and strength enough to keep smiling.
I was diagnosed with a rare disease called Isaacs’ Syndrome. Isaacs’ is a neuromuscular health condition that stems from muscle hyperactivity. My lift post-diagnosis underwent a drastic change. In the process, I also discovered that I had Lyme disease. Lyme is a bacterial illness that gets transmitted through ticks. I was also accompanied by Glaucoma. Glaucoma is an eye-related disease that damages the optic nerves. And Membranous Glomerulonephritis is a progressive kidney disease.
My attempts to recover from Isaacs’ Syndrome have also thrown up some lighter moments. My readers may see it as somewhat self-deprecating humour. For instance, my first thought on hearing of Isaacs’ Syndrome was that it was named for Isaac Newton’s contributions to medical science. Also, my diagnostic reports mentioned neuromyotonia (the other name for Isaacs’). It left me wondering if it had a simpler name and did not sound like a weapon of some kind. Later, a friend joked that running a Google search for my symptoms caused their computer to hang.
The times I was hospitalized brought in their own hilarity. During admission, I would chuckle to myself thinking that the staff would first diagnose my insurance policy for good health before diagnosing me. When my medication was changed, I thought I was experiencing some kind of withdrawal symptom, and that the resultant diabetes was causing side-effects like deafness. Why else could I not hear myself chewing on my much-beloved chocolate cake? At another time, I tiptoed past the medicines on my bedside table, not wanting to wake up my sleeping pills.
I also became more appreciative of others’ attempts at infusing humour into my life. The time when a friend reminded me of my turn to serve when playing table tennis chose to wax Biblical, saying “Humans are born to serve and not to be served”.
Over time, I began to collect humour-related – and humorous trivia. For instance, the funny bone is badly named because it is neither a bone nor is it funny when one gets hurt there!
I found out that babies apparently laugh 400 times a day. The Greek Stoic philosopher Chrysippus (of Soli) supposedly died laughing.
World Laughter Day was initiated in India by a Mumbai-based doctor. But India is ranked an abysmally low 140th per the Happiness Report, 2019.
We could also use a laugh more occasionally. I sometimes joke to myself that God would not create us just to give himself an existential crisis.
I sincerely hope you readers do not ever find yourself as humourless as I have sometimes seen myself become.
DISCLAIMER
The views expressed above in this article are the author’s own and do not represent any kind of medical advice.
