Manfluenza: The struggle is not real

I’m getting over a cold. It’s been a fairly nasty one. I even stayed home from work for a day. But I only did that because things have been rather slow at the office. If it had been busy, I would have soldiered on, avoiding contact with coworkers and frequently washing my hands and sanitizing things around me. But throughout the dredges of this rhinovirus, I have carried on with adulting. I have taken care of my child in the mornings while hung over from Nyquil - playing memory card games with him and letting him “help” mop the floor. I’ve met social obligations. I cleaned and made dinners. And I’ve largely been pleasant while doing so. I have sucked it up, taken the good cold medicine you have to get behind the counter and kept on with life. The only thing I changed was I temporarily stopped working out, which I needed to do anyway to rest an IT band injury (a part of my body I didn’t even know existed until I hurt it). 

A couple days later, my husband came down with the same cold. And the world ended. He claimed his head felt disconnected from his body when he took the same cold medicine I did. When it was his turn to get up with our toddler on the weekend morning, he lay lifeless on the couch and put Bob the Builder on Netflix to entertain the kiddo. While I usually let him sleep in until 10 on weekends when it’s my turn to get up early, he came in around 8:45 a.m. begging me to take over because he just couldn’t handle laying on the couch anymore and needed to rest from his exhaustive supervision of our child. He is cranky and largely silent. A mention that it is his turn to clean up the pee that ended up outside the litter box is met with incredulity that I would demand any sort of physical activity when he is in such a state. He has a man cold. Or, as I like to call it, manfluenza. 

There’s a reason God chose women to bear children. Because he knew men couldn’t handle it. They do not have the capacity for prolonged pain and discomfort. Example: I’m in charge of blood drives at the law enforcement agency where I work. You know who always turns out in spades? Women. The office workers and dispatchers. The female officers. And the guys on the SWAT team? Nada. I cornered a whole squad of them one day and asked them to come donate. They refused. Scared of needles, they said. (These are the guys who bust into the homes of the armed and dangerous and risk getting shot daily.) At our last drive, I apologized to the phlebotomist who was drawing my blood for such a low turn-out of dudes in our male-dominated organization. She said it’s that way at every mobile blood drive, and estimated the female-to-male ratio at these drives to be 80 percent to 20 percent. I asked why.

“Because men are wimps,” she said. 

(To be fair, my spouse is a regular blood donor.) 

And I am by no means singling out my husband, here. This is a universal phenomenon. There is a whole web site devoted to this. And then there’s this gem from WebMD: 

“Researchers at England's University of Glasgow studied nearly 1,700 people and found that men were more likely than women to overrate their common cold symptoms. The researchers theorized that men and women have different thresholds for perceiving and reporting symptoms, rather than actual differences in symptoms.”

About a year into our marriage, I got my first look at real manfluenza. My husband had what obviously was a 24-hour stomach bug (which I never got) right around New Year’s Eve. At the same time, one of my friends had just had a baby, and I wanted to go visit them in the hospital. I told my husband as I was leaving for work that I was going to stop by the hospital after work and would therefore be late coming home. 

He said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. What if I die when you’re gone? I think you should take me to the hospital now.” There was no humor in his voice. He was dead serious. 

I played the odds he wouldn’t die and went to work anyway, leaving him at home alone to convalesce. I called late in the afternoon to check in on him. 

“I don’t know if I’m going to make it,” he said. “Can you at least take me to see a doctor?” 

“Are you still throwing up?” I asked.

“No, I haven’t for a while. But I’m so… so…. tired.”

Needless to say, he recovered without medical intervention. And I visited my friend and her new baby.

All my girlfriends report similar bouts of manfluenza with their spouses. When I was growing up, I remember my mom still doing laundry and making dinner when she was sick. My dad? He just sat on the couch when ill and snapped at anyone who dared approach him. 

My dad did get sick less often than my mom, though. The opposite is true in our house. In general, I am healthier than my husband. I get sick less frequently than him, and when I do get sick, I’m over it quicker. This could be because I have several habits he doesn’t, which include eating fruits and vegetables, working out fairly regularly and not staying up late to play computer games. When I was pregnant a few years ago, we both got the stomach flu (which I strongly suspect to be norovirus obtained from an anniversary dinner for which we paid $160 at a purportedly swanky Argentinian restaurant - but I digress). Despite my pregnancy-compromised immune system, my illness consisted of nausea and vomiting for just 4 or 5 hours at night followed by a single day of sharting. My husband vomited for three days straight before the infection moved south. I had already been back to work for days at that point and had gone on about the business of growing a human being inside of me. 

Men also really want to make sure you know they’re sick. There’s nothing stoic about an ill male. Of course there’s the whining. And telling people they don’t feel good. But the worst is the fighter jet-decibel-level sneezes. I and most women I know try to make our sneezes as small and confined as possible. Especially when there’s, say, a sleeping 2-year-old nearby. But not men. Ooooh no. They want everyone in a 2-mile radius to know they have a nasal irritant. Which is why I conclude with a link to one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits ever.