They Won't All Get Your Jokes

 

As I've noted several times, if you are a HP or indeed in any acute healthcare profession, it's likely you will develop an unusual sense of humour, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2025/03/rose-cottage-humour.html. Unfortunately not everybody will understand your sense of humour if they have not shared your unique experience of such service. This can easily lead to misunderstandings and offence. You have to be careful whom you share some of your hospital jokes with. Case in point: I was on a patients' forum a while ago, one which I won't identify, when somebody was telling the story of their endoscopy appointment. Endoscopy is a medical technique in which a doctor examines the inside of a patient's body using a small electronic camera. It is an alternative to diagnostic surgery. It is far less invasive and can usually be done in outpatients. It has only been carried out for a couple of decades because the technology has only recently been invented. The most common kind of procedure is to insert the camera, called an endoscope, into a body cavity such as the mouth, anus, vagina, urethra etc. One of the forum members was talking openly about his anal examination and I wrote as a reply: "I once dated a woman from endoscopy. She was surprisingly vanilla in bed!" This went down like a lead balloon. Nobody openly criticized me for it, I received no PM's from the moderator; but the usual replies and reactions were absent indicating the social media equivalent of a stony silence. I deleted my comment and things went back to normal. The joke I had made was one distinctly embedded in hospital culture. Jokes are funnier when you don't have to explain them, but maybe I should have just left it on the thread and posted an apology-stroke-explanation below it. It compares the practices of endoscopy to extreme sexual activity; bondage, S&M etc. The term "vanilla" was used by one of the characters in the book Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James, a bestseller about violent sex. It means normal sex without the violence... As the late great Frankie Howerd used to say, please yourselves! I really should have known better, but I can be a bit insensitive at times when reading other people on forums. Hope readers can avoid my mistake.