The week of Christmas, my wife and I caught the same cold. And our reactions were pretty typical for us - I laid in bed for over a day while she “soldiered on”.
It is now January 7th. Take a guess which one of us has felt fine since 12-28 and which had a coughing fit so dire last night that they were gasping for breath an hour later and nearly fainted? “I wish I could get over colds as easily as you do”, I’m told, but to respond “You can, it’s just when you are sick you just have to rest from your regimen of walking 8-13 miles every day and the incessant idea that you’re somehow ‘failing’ by staying in bed/on the couch for a day or so and allow your body time and energy to heal” is pretty much guaranteed to start an argument, so there it lays.
OK, I’m single and therefore have no dog in this fight, but when did that ever stop anyone on this board from chiming in?
While your position is reasonable and good, someone has to be up and about to take care of the household. When I was sick with strep throat and had a fever and the worst sore throat of my life, as a single person who lives alone I still had to feed the cats, change their litter, and shovel the driveway and sidewalk, because those things could not wait for me to get better. If I and my partner were both sick and s/he decided to uniformally take it easy and recover in bed, well, who is going to do the chores that need to be done? We can’t both stay in bed all day for days – the cats will starve, they’ll pee on the rug, and we’ll get fined for not clearing the snow away. If my partner’s not budging from recovery mode, that sucks, but I’m sick and don’t feel like fighting, so okay, I’ll go shove the- no, it’s fine, I’ll do it, I’ll do it, IT’S FINE OKAY?!
The men in my life I’ve been around when they’re sick at home have not been babies about it at all, while my mother would shuffle around in her bathrobe and wail (only half-joking), “POOR ME,” so my experience does not conform to the thread title, either. IME, it’s not about gender, it’s about personality and who can get away with what without causing major atmospheric disturbances in the household.
My hasty generalization has always been - women express concern for their health when they’re well, men express concern for their health when they’re ill.
Our only child is 13yo and is quite willing to make her own meals. She doesn’t need her mom to get a bowl of strawberries from the fridge or to heat up a bowl of soup. Sophie makes her own bread from flour and stuff - it’s not like she’s going to starve.
Kid can also do things like load/run/unload dishwasher, clothes, etc if they need to be done. She’s even capable of letting the dog out in the fenced-in backyard.
No snow here in San Antonio.
But it’s not so much the chores that are the issue… hell, I ironed my shirts during my sickness and made my own meals. But rather it’s the 10+ miles of walking and other exercise that she insists upon doing no matter how sick she is. Like last night - she had a coughing fit, almost fainted, had difficulty breathing for about 2 hours after that… and her response? She came home, yelled at us for not answering the phone (it didn’t ring as cell reception in our house sucks), and then, though she was still wheezing, went out for another hour+ of walking in the dark. Sorry, but that just draws a big ol’ WTF? from me and my daughter.
So if you’re exercising to the point of exhaustion while you are sick and don’t understand why it’s difficult for you to get well… perhaps the delay in wellness may be the fact that you’re constantly exercising yourself to the point of exhaustion? Hell, I don’t know, I’m not a doctor nor have I played one on TV but it seems the two are correlated.
Well, in that case, you are right and your wife is being foolish. Or just needs to understand that you can take a break from walking 10+ miles a day once in a while and you won’t gain weight in an instant, and it’s a known rule-of-thumb that you’re okay to work out of the sickness is above the neck (headcold), but if it’s below the neck (coughing, stomach problem), you need to sit out or risk much more serious illness.
I don’t deny that many women make a near daily habit of recounting their aches and pains to any ear that allows bending, but even the research I linked to admits that. But that is not being a baby, it’s being an attention seeking hypochondriac.
Men, on the other hand, who admittedly seem to get sick less often and complain about real illness even less, turn in to puddles of embryonic goo when struck with a cold or slight virus. It’s a conundrum
So, men make less fuss when they’re not ill, and less fuss when they’re seriously ill, but you feel the need to bitch about the small window in between? You’re quite the prize, aren’t you?
I think a lot is to be said in the difference of who men are (a hurt-able vulnerable person or soul), and the pressure to be who society says they should be (manly-man). When knocked down it’s easier to let the real person express that they do hurt, especially in a trusted environment.
Women OTOH have the pressure to break away from the stereotypical modern day (a hurt-able vulnerable person or soul view) and may feel a need to ‘prove’ themselves a strong person.
There may be a bit of biology in this as well. For women the need to take care of children (even the adult husband kind) ofter takes priority over their own health, for men the need to get back to normal activity is perhaps more of a priority - and may have them ‘shut down’ sooner.
As for the form it takes, I figured this out a couple of years ago. What it actually means to ‘take care of yourself’ when sick. To me is think of yourself as a sick child in your care with your desire to have this child get better. I do believe this helps immensely in the healing, getting better category as well as returning to a wellness state. In this things like what temperature the house is set or what food is eaten at is solely determined by the health and comfort of the ‘child’ and not by the cost.
Women who have the plague and “soldier on” are put upon by their ridiculous husbands. Men who have a cold and go to work are jerks.
Women complain about every ache and pain and somehow get “sick” 40% more often than men, despite having stronger immune systems, but they’re not over inflating their symptoms.
By all rights men should get sick more often than women, but somehow we don’t. Perhaps that’s because when a woman is proudly working through a devastating cold that would turn a man into goo, the men are just shutting their mouths and working.
I think it depends on the person. Every time my husband has a cold, he wraps his entire a head in a scarf, lies down on the couch and proclaims that he “feels weak,” much like Scarlett O’Hara.
I took care of a child with an upper respiratory infection toward the end of recuperating from shingles and dragged my sorry ass directly from the hospital where I had emergency surgery for an ectopic pregnancy to the YMCA after I loaded up on percocet to watch my son’s first basketball game, which he was so freaking proud of. (Then I promptly went home and cried; it was technically a ball of cells, but losing any baby is devastating.)
My husband definitely gets my sympathy when he’s feeling sick, but I happen to have a far higher tolerance for pain and discomfort than he does. He does try to take care of me when I’m sick, but often requires enough help figuring out how to cook meals and/or clean that it’s easier for me to suck it up and deal than lie down.
I see the agenda now. Women are so jealous of our manliness that they are trying to turn us into little sissy women. First with the “men are babies” propaganda and now with their “medical science” “study”.
