Laughter, the Best Medicine: Of Beano and Blackberry Jam

Jeanie sighed audibly as she surveyed her elderly Ford Taurus, which sat catty-wampus in the parking stall as usual. Ever since she'd started on the mood stabilizer, she'd been incapable of parking her car straight, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't seem to recapture what little depth perception she'd ever had.

Still, she had a good feeling about this appointment, thinking that it just might be the last of a long series stretching back to late winter.....at least for a while. Not that she didn't adore her psychiatrist---how can you NOT love a guy whose favorite movie is National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation?---but those $50 co-pays every couple of weeks had blown a hole the size of Denver in the family budget.

Besides, she'd finally found the place called "stable", which had been an elusive concept only a few months ago. Back then, she was bouncing off the walls at work and annoying the daylights out of everyone at home....except perhaps for the family cats, who really didn't give a hoot if she was manic or depressed, as long as she fulfilled their nightly requirement of 9 Lives turkey-and-giblets.

She'd never been Dr. H. D. Schrinker's first patient of the day before; had never seen him before he'd downed half a gallon of Diet Coke (talk about bouncing off the walls!) and so she wondered how cheerful he was in the mornings. They were actually a lot alike, and probably would've been the best of friends had they not been doctor and patient, so she pictured him as something of a grump. She was proven wrong almost immediately as the good doctor bounded into the office as usual with the enthusiasm and charm of an overgrown puppy, and greeted her with "Good morning, lovely, it's great to see you!"

Strangely enough, she had never minded the terms of endearment he used with her, even though he was her junior by a full decade. He never patronized her, and she knew he accorded her great respect as the nurse she was; they both spoke the language of medicine, and discussed the clinical aspects of her illness in clinical terms. But when the serious stuff was over, the fun began.

This time, it started with the ugly pea-green liquid inside Dr. Schrinker's Rubbermaid bottle, which was definitely NOT his customary Diet Coke. The sight of it prompted a question that slipped past Jeanie's filter before she could catch herself: "What the deuce is THAT!? It looks like the puke I cleaned up yesterday!"

Dr. S. grinned and took the cap off, offering her a sniff of what turned out to be carrot-spinach-mango-peach juice, which smelled vastly better than it looked. At that point, the conversation took a surprising turn, given the fact that she had never known a man who canned his own fruits and vegetables, let alone knew how to make blackberry jam. She also learned that he was a frequent victim of his own excesses in the consumption of these articles, and had developed a rather nasty case of irritable bowel which he treated, as he put it, with "prayer and a Costco-size bottle of Beano".

"Believe me, you don't want to be in here after I've gone rounds with my IBS," was his final comment on the subject.

"Is this your idea of 'therapeutic communication'?" Jeanie sputtered, her mouthful of coffee having escaped rather forcefully under the pressure of laughter. "Next time, you might wanna give me a beverage alert---you almost ended up wearing my go-go juice."

It occurred to Jeanie then that "this" was indeed therapeutic......maybe even more so than the handful of sanity Dr. S. prescribed for her, or the cognitive-behavioral therapy they'd been working on all these months. Humor had always been her go-to mechanism whenever life got too complicated, too scary, too loud, too bright. Somewhere along the line, she'd forgotten how to use it.......and now it was back, as big and exuberant as if she had never even heard of the condition which had brought her to this office in the first place.

As she'd anticipated, Dr. S. deemed her stable enough to "graduate" to quarterly visits, and as she left his office, she concluded that not having to go to the doctor so often must mean that she wasn't sick anymore.

Her joyous laughter could be heard on the late-summer wind as she drove away.