Talk about dark humor

I've got nothing against dark humor. It can help get us through our darkest hours.

Some of those darkest hours are spent at work. At one always-failing yet battily resilient tech company I worked at, a bunch of us came to a Halloween gathering dressed as dead products. (You had to be there.)

At the same company - where we had a long tradition of "Friday Party", a Friday afternoon beer, wine, and junk food blast - our Cambridge division, where I worked, was being closed down and swept up into the boring maws of the suburban branch of our company. For one of our last Friday Parties, which, as it happened was also our St. Patrick's Day celebration, we invited the suburbanites to risk a trip into town to join us at the Leprechaulony. (I know my notations off here, but leprechaun: leper :: colony: colony -> leprechalony. Okay, once again, you had to be there.)

Earlier, at the Cambridge outpost, there'd been a layoff on Valentine's Day which we immediately dubbed the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. This was on a Friday. Perfect timing for this outfit, Friday being - of course - considered the absolute worst day to lay anyone off. (At least in those pre-Internet days, you  couldn't do anything about signing up for unemployment or starting much of a job search over the weekend. So there was nothing to do other than sit around licking your wounds and being depressed. That is, until the Sunday papers came out, which back in the day published something called Help Wanted ads.) Anyway, for Friday Party, we scored a giant heart-shaped cake that we slashed down the middle with a big old knife.

Our biggest satisfaction was that a blizzard had begun, and the home office evildoers who'd flown in from Philadelphia to conduct the layoff were stranded in Boston over the weekend. Hah!

Dark humor, of course, also attends death.

My mother, who did not have much of a sense of humor, talked about how she and her sisters were in gales of laughter about whether my grandmother should be laid out wearing a corset, as she was never without one. 

The funeral parlor where my Aunt Margaret was waked quite peculiarly had baskets of souvenir day-glow whistles in the ladies room. If you don't think that Margaret's daughter, granddaughters, and nieces (completely and utterly devastated by the death of our beloved Margaret, by the way) loaded up on souvenir day-glow whistles, you don't know our family. We still laugh about them. (And I still have mine.)

It's no surprise that those who deal with life and death use black humor to cope with the stress. M*A*S*H was a fictionalized/theatricalized case in point. 

But some of the OB-GYN residents at a hospital n Michigan took it just a bit too far.

Last week, they posted a few rather unsavory pics on Instagram:

One showed a doctor posing with a large human tissue in his hand while the patient lay on the operating table.

In another, a physician holds an organ that was surgically removed. (Source: WaPo)

They then:

...asked the public to guess how much an unidentified organ weighed in a game they equated to ‘Price is Right.’

“The other game we play in the OR is guess that weight,” read the Instagram post that showed the organ. “It applies to much more than just babies. As always, ‘Price is Right’ rules apply so if you go over then you’re out!”

How'd you like to find out that was your surgically removed organ that the residents were yucking it up about? On Insta, for all the world to see. Ho, ho!

And not that all the world follows these residents, but apparently it was possible to actually see the patient whose fibroid tumor had just been removed via the morcellation procedure, which is used to extract tumors laparoscopically. Apparently the attending physician had challenged the residents to compete with each other for the longest strand removed. Ho, extra-big ho? I guess you had to be there.

It's not that funny to begin with, but it sure doesn't help that morcellation is a somewhat discredited technique. When it works, it's great, as it's a non-invasive procedure used on fibroids, most of which are non-cancerous. But if that tumor turns out to be cancerous, morcellation just waves the red flag and spreads cancer cells all over everywhere. (And you thought it was all about first, do no harm...)

Spectrum Health, which runs the hospital where the Instagramming residents worked, is tut-tutting away and will be taking "corrective action."

Social media being what it is, was, and ever will be, some commenters are demanding that the posters get fired.

Pardon the use of the term, but this strikes me like overkill.

Yes, posting those pictures was stupid and thoughtless, but who among us hasn't done something stupid and/or thoughtless somewhere along the line. And this, to me, doesn't rise to the level of firing offense.

But while it really doesn't speak to their skill level, or even where their hearts truly lie - you really had to be there - it does speak to a god-awful lack of judgement. And, I'm guessing some sort of HIPAA violation. Not to mention that there are no doubt ambulance chasers chasing after the patients who unwittingly starred in this production. Spectrum might have to settle a few bucks to make this problem go away.

These folks have a really tough job, and if humor gets them through it, fine by me. Even if they're making fun of my tumors. Have at it! Just make sure you pay attention and don't leave any sponges in my gut, okay?

But these doctors just didn't need to go public with it. And Instagram is about as public as it gets. (I guess we should be grateful that they didn't post a dance video of the episode on TikTok. ) 

But dark humor is mostly a private thing. It really only works if you're there. (Unless you're the patient, in which case it doesn't work at all.) And even though, these days, nothing seems to exist unless it's shared on line, some things are private. And we need to keep it that way.