Actually in this case it’s “less sick than I was a couple of days ago,” but the point stands.
I had a 102 degree fever, complete shutdown of both nostrils, wet hacking cough so bad that it made me throw up, throat that felt like it was lined with broken glass. Chef Jr. (who is a grown-ass man of 30) has only the cough, and based on the fact that his voice sounds the same while mine sounded like Ernest Borgnine’s, I’m willing to bet that even the cough isn’t as bad as mine was. He’s whimpering around the house saying stuff like “if this isn’t better by tomorrow I’m going to HAVE to call in sick from work because I can’t possibly handle work like this.”
C’mere, son, and let me introduce you to a fun thing called suffering in silence.
Well, when you put it that way, yeah, but it’s not like he’s saying “Maybe I should call in sick because I’d hate to make someone else catch this if I’m contagious,” it’s all about “The slightest discomfort makes my completely undemanding job something that cannot be borne.”
(I’m willing to admit that part of that is sour grapes because I work from home, which has a really high bar for what constitutes “too sick to work” (a bar that I reached last Thursday).
There’s something about that “someone who’s less sick …” being a family member.
We know our family members’ habits much better than that of our co-workers, so it is unfortunately all too easy to pass judgment on them. I am guilty of this all the time!
Men are the worst about this, if they get a little sniffle some of them turn into sick Victorian children who just want mummy to carry them into the garden one last time before they die of consumption.
While granted that’s annoying, it’s also annoying when you don’t really feel particularly sick at all. In fact, you feel just fine, and would have no problem going in to work like normal… except that you can’t, because you’re probably contagious.
I think that all of the messages I got from people saying “Oh, I’m so sorry, I hope you feel better soon!”, if anything, made it even worse.
Having worked in ERs, this is quite a typical gender stereotype that is only brought out when an appropriate example appears, then gets generalized to ‘all men’.
I saw enough guys in the ER actually start to die of sepsis and heart attacks and other severe illnesses because they insisted on working thru their symptoms and didn’t want to be perceived as ‘weak’ or their families were desperately in need of their wages.
I think maybe there are two mutually exclusive male responses to illness that both have some anecdotal basis, and which one you encounter may depend on either the person or the situation. Possibly the “man-cold - call the ambulance” response is more likely to come out when the male in question feels like he doesn’t have to act tough, which unfortunately means that spouses/parents are more likely to witness it. I freely admit I tend more to the “it’s only a flesh wound” response, which is why it was so difficult to just get over myself and take a day off to rest last week.
Not to contradict Qadgop, but this holds true in our household. I don’t know why, but when I get a cold I feel absolutely without energy, exhausted. Just let me lay here in peace before I die. My wife gets the same cold? It’s just another day and she has stuff to do.
Sounds like a bathtub curve to me. Men get a hangnail and it’s a crisis. Men have a heart attack and if they can still stand they keep shoveling the coal.
He refused to believe his doctor when doctor told him that he was having a heart attack and insisted on having blood drawn just to double check. It wasn’t until the next morning, when his doctor called the person to be notified in case of an emergency (me) that Hubs went to the ER and ended up having a quad bypass.
You know, that sounds right, too. Sprains, breaks, contusions—maybe I’ll put some ice on it. Certainly not missing work or going to a doctor, not till it gets gangrenous.
We have something of the male/female distinction going on in my house. I don’t comment much on any discomfort/illness I feel, or feel compelled to formally assess it.
Better Half doesn’t act like a huge baby, but he needs to take his temperature every 10 minutes, even when it’s obvious he isn’t running a fever.
I soldiered on because I thought my increasingly frequent episodes of chest pain couldn’t possibly be cardiac (I thought GERD) because the first occurrence did not kill me. Turned out to be unstable angina with at least one episode representing an infarction. A stent fixed me, but I waited 5 weeks to seek care.
When I was a kid I had a lot of health problems (asthma, bad back, debilitating allergies) and my dad was of the opinion that you had tough out everything. I grew up being told I was a worthless lazy piece of shit almost every day of my childhood.
Once I hurt my foot and couldn’t put my weight on it but my dad insisted I had to go to school and stop being a drama queen. I did and literally hopped on one foot all day. (I was in elementary school.)
My mom picked me up from school and took me to a doctor where they did x-rays and said I’d fractured my ankle. They gave me a cast and crutches. My dad was PISSED that my mom took me to a doctor and made me feel like a loser.
So it’s probably no wonder that to this day I tend to force myself to go to work when I shouldn’t and avoid hospitals because I don’t want to take the time off and burden coworkers. I know intellectually that it’s stupid and so many times I’ve made myself worse but I can’t help it.
The only good thing about living after Covid is that if I have any respiratory symptoms that I’m sure are more than allergies, I stay home. It helps that most of the time I can work from home so at least I’m getting things done. But even still, it’s now a balancing act of not burdening my coworkers with my absence and not burdening my coworkers with a contagious disease. I still don’t give a shit about my own health. It’s not even a conscious thing, it just doesn’t occur to me to consider it.
I will say I don’t treat my kids like my dad treated me. I do my best to be patient and don’t dismiss when they’re not feeling well. I only treat myself like shit. So that’s a kind of progress I suppose.
This is the tougher part. I carried a great deal from my childhood through most of my adult life. It was exhausting and at times paralyzing. But I got help (and sober) and then I had a shot. Things are a lot better now.