Ill
Men get different strains of illness than the rest of humanity and so have a different relationship with sickness. I blame moisturiser marketed at men. Before men were told they had to be sensitive, we had three varieties of illness; viral, industrial accident, death – and sometimes a chap would pass off death as ‘just a bit of a cold’.
The truth is that men do not think ‘how sick am I?’ but rather, ‘what will this stop me from doing?’ If a man has a cold and is faced with any situation that might require him to spend time loitering outside a changing room waiting for his wife, feeling uncomfortable and trying not to look like a pervert, worrying about giving the right opinion on the outfit and starting to sweat, sweat like a pervert - he pleads man-flu, makes himself a lemony drink and takes to the sofa.
If he has a temperature of 106, is sweating so much somebody wants to go over him in a barrel and is getting through more tissues than a teen who has disabled the parental controls on the family PC, this will not stop him going out for a quick drink.
That’s why men try to play down DIY accidents. A severed thumb might mean that you are never asked to put up shelves again, but it also means that you won’t be able to play with that brand new circular saw you’ve only used once.
A hundred years ago, there was a simple scale of health. If you were poor you didn’t get enough to eat. If you were rich then you were busy contracting some fashionable pox.
Standard issue healthy was upright, but afflicted by any number and combination of maladies that stunted your growth, gave you sores, caused you to walk funny, caused you to look at people funny or caused people to look funny at you, throw rocks at you and in extreme cases hound you out of the village with pitchforks.
If you were ‘poorly’ this normally meant that working eighteen hours a day in a factory or down a coal mine had left you with the sort of cough that would shake a lesser man apart at the seams and a talent for producing different coloured phlegm to order, including multi-coloured on bank holidays.
‘Badly’ was a description of the after-effects of a threshing accident. Today we would say ‘in a critical condition’ or ‘has anybody found his head yet?’ In the huge open plan mills of the industrial revolution, being caught in a loom and accidentally woven into the pattern of a carpet was so common that the drama was downplayed. Likewise, farming and industrial machinery consisted of overheated boilers and flywheels driving exposed belt-loops designed to catch bonnets, frilly shirts and other clothing of the age.
I would classify my own condition as ‘malingering’ today, but if you had asked me on Sunday I would probably have replied ‘oh Christ I think I’ve fucked my liver!’
Apparently you can’t drink two bottles of wine every night for two months without some sort of effect. I had thought the only effect was the increased frequency of visits to the bottle bank but the reality is that when you develop a sharp pain in the vicinity of your liver the actual effect of all that booze is extreme paranoia.
Deciding that hysteria was the only sensible option, I googled. First I found out where my liver was, then I had a panic attack and spent the weekend checking myself in the mirror against an old ‘buttercup dawn’ paint swatch card to see if I was turning yellow. Things were so bad I took myself off to the quacks.
Doctors take all the fun and drama out of being ill. She prodded my stomach and announced I had dyspepsia. As I didn’t actually have a can of Tenant’s Super in my hand at the time, she wasn’t buying my drinking to excess story leaving me not with the wasting disease of a romantic poet, but the sensitive stomach of somebody who eats too much spicy food!
Actually, that’s good news – time for a pint?
The truth is that men do not think ‘how sick am I?’ but rather, ‘what will this stop me from doing?’ If a man has a cold and is faced with any situation that might require him to spend time loitering outside a changing room waiting for his wife, feeling uncomfortable and trying not to look like a pervert, worrying about giving the right opinion on the outfit and starting to sweat, sweat like a pervert - he pleads man-flu, makes himself a lemony drink and takes to the sofa.
If he has a temperature of 106, is sweating so much somebody wants to go over him in a barrel and is getting through more tissues than a teen who has disabled the parental controls on the family PC, this will not stop him going out for a quick drink.
That’s why men try to play down DIY accidents. A severed thumb might mean that you are never asked to put up shelves again, but it also means that you won’t be able to play with that brand new circular saw you’ve only used once.
A hundred years ago, there was a simple scale of health. If you were poor you didn’t get enough to eat. If you were rich then you were busy contracting some fashionable pox.
Standard issue healthy was upright, but afflicted by any number and combination of maladies that stunted your growth, gave you sores, caused you to walk funny, caused you to look at people funny or caused people to look funny at you, throw rocks at you and in extreme cases hound you out of the village with pitchforks.
If you were ‘poorly’ this normally meant that working eighteen hours a day in a factory or down a coal mine had left you with the sort of cough that would shake a lesser man apart at the seams and a talent for producing different coloured phlegm to order, including multi-coloured on bank holidays.
‘Badly’ was a description of the after-effects of a threshing accident. Today we would say ‘in a critical condition’ or ‘has anybody found his head yet?’ In the huge open plan mills of the industrial revolution, being caught in a loom and accidentally woven into the pattern of a carpet was so common that the drama was downplayed. Likewise, farming and industrial machinery consisted of overheated boilers and flywheels driving exposed belt-loops designed to catch bonnets, frilly shirts and other clothing of the age.
I would classify my own condition as ‘malingering’ today, but if you had asked me on Sunday I would probably have replied ‘oh Christ I think I’ve fucked my liver!’
Apparently you can’t drink two bottles of wine every night for two months without some sort of effect. I had thought the only effect was the increased frequency of visits to the bottle bank but the reality is that when you develop a sharp pain in the vicinity of your liver the actual effect of all that booze is extreme paranoia.
Deciding that hysteria was the only sensible option, I googled. First I found out where my liver was, then I had a panic attack and spent the weekend checking myself in the mirror against an old ‘buttercup dawn’ paint swatch card to see if I was turning yellow. Things were so bad I took myself off to the quacks.
Doctors take all the fun and drama out of being ill. She prodded my stomach and announced I had dyspepsia. As I didn’t actually have a can of Tenant’s Super in my hand at the time, she wasn’t buying my drinking to excess story leaving me not with the wasting disease of a romantic poet, but the sensitive stomach of somebody who eats too much spicy food!
Actually, that’s good news – time for a pint?
1 Comments:
When men get sick it truly baffles me. There seem to be two types: the ones who act like they're dying and want sympathy and to be babied. Then, as it seems the guy I'm dating is, there is the man who act like they're dying while also acting like a martyr. Either way, a pain in my arse.
Women just wash their sheets, take some over the counter meds and get on with it.
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