Cancer Comic Strip

My name is Suzan St Maur and I've had cancer twice. I find that humor helps me get through my cancer, and from what I understand it helps many others too. This blog is dedicated not to information about the disease, but to cancer warriors and their relatives/friends who just want some cheering chuckles. By all means share your funny stories and jokes with us - email them to suze @ suzanstmaur.com (If you want to know more about me see my profile on here or http://HowToWriteBetter.net)

Friday, February 16, 2007

A bad day at the office - or on the cress of a wave?

Hi all and apologies for now including Google Ads, but it would be nice to have a few pennies' worth of revenue from CancerComicStrip to give to one of my favourite cancer charities (Breakthrough Breast Cancer and McMillan, here in the UK.) So get clicking and you can help, too.

And if you think you've had a tough day at work, console yourself with this (original author unknown, but thank you, whoever you are)...

Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 on FM dial in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, which was sponsoring a Worst Job Experience Contest.

Needless to say, she won.

"Hi Sis,

Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it's not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job.

As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wetsuit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It's like working in a Jacuzzi.

Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse.

Within a few seconds my butt started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don't have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate.

When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt.

I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically.

Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression.

When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet.

As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn't poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut.


That will be a comforting thought for us all the next time we fret over a broken water-cooler at the office.

And here's another gem from the weirdo research brigade ... did you know that eating watercress can help prevent cancer?

According to this article in the British Daily Mail, eating gobs of watercress will provide you with lots of useful anti-oxidants that can ward off the Big C.

Needless to say the fact that this scientific, unbiased research was funded by British watercress suppliers, is entirely unrelated to the study's findings...

Mind you, the cancer experts were not quite convinced. The article goes on:

... Karol Sikora, professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College London, said the findings of the study were 'grossly overstated'.

He added: 'We know that fruits and vegetables all do affect DNA damage, hence the five-a-day strategy to prevent cancer.'

'There is absolutely nothing special about watercress. I don't think people will seriously convert to eating 85g of the stuff each day. That's an awful lot of cress!'

'You might even turn green. Much better to look holistically at your diet and ensure that there's plenty of fruit and vegetables, fibre and as little fat as possible.'


So I'd better get down to the grocery store and fill up my fridge with the stuff. If I turn green I'll let you know; might be a cool new look for Spring.

SUZE