If a man whines and there's no woman to hear him...
Getting sick just isn’t any fun anymore.
The best part of wallowing through a cold or flu or hangnail or some other major medical catastrophe was that it came with a free pass to drive my wife nuts. Who would yell at a man in agony, right?
Now I am a widower and let me tell you, this suffering in silence thing is miserable. I hated to do it, but I can’t stand to hear a fully grown man whine.
Up until this past week, I could have sworn that I never, ever whined.
“Oh, you whine,” Terry used to assure me. She tends to exaggerate.
Yes, Terry said, her wedding vows DID mention better or worse and sickness or health, but there was NOTHING in there about putting up with “whining.”
(Point of clarification: I was NOT whining. I calmly and concisely detailed every last symptom I experienced to assist her in making an accurate diagnosis — then repeated the report two or three or 67 times just to make sure she heard every bit of it correctly. I cannot overstate the importance of accuracy when one is in such dire condition as I was. C’mon, another two degrees or so and I would have been running a fever.)
“Your laundry list of whines and whimpers sound like a herd of hungry kittens at feeding time,” she said. “No, wait, a flock of geese chasing a herd of cats. And they all have sinus issues.”
You know, a little spousal sympathy once in a while wouldn’t hurt.
“So you got a couple sniffles. Big deal! When I had the flu, a broken arm and ruptured spleen all at once, I still cooked all the meals, bathed all the kids, drove them to soccer, band and scouts, scrubbed the floors, never missed a day of work, and built that addition to the garage you wanted but you were too busy fishing to do.
"So get off that couch, grab a hankie and start the car. We’re going to Sandra’s wedding and that’s final! And stop that whining.”
Is she positive that whining wasn’t included in the wedding vows? I thought I added it.
“Nice try, bucko. Now let’s go.”
A good man has never suffered an illness so great that the good woman behind him won’t cling to something more exotic while she’s kicking him to recovery.
Nor has a good man ever suffered an illness so great that the good woman behind him cannot insinuate in painful detail why it was his own stupid fault, and how he would have healed sooner had he just stopped whining, and taken his medicine like she told him to.
Look, if I’d worn that coat in the rain, it would have just gotten wet. Besides, it was a warm rain.
“You know what else wasn’t in the wedding vows?” she said. “Pampering. I can pull out our wedding video and you can see for yourself. The word ‘pampering’ wasn’t there.”
All that vow requires, according to her opinion, is to love me even when I’m not faking the 24-hour bubonic plague to get out of yard work.
When I am sick, Terry offers me ibuprofen and the occasional back rub — and far more vitamins, vegetables, apple cider vinegar and Vicks VapoRub than necessary in one sitting. But she figures I can change my own channel, spoon my own chicken noodle soup and blow my own nose.
I have actually heard wives claim that husbands are just big babies who’d shrivel up if they ever have to deal with real pain. This is where they bring up that whole childbirth thing again.
Hey, they’ve obviously never had a sliver of wood from a garage project embedded in their palm. Now there’s some pain, let me tell you. But I dealt with it just fine. I followed her around the house, repeating, “Make it stop hurting. Make it stop!” — for accuracy of diagnosis — until she finally set aside the fire extinguisher (I guess it’s not 450 degrees to reheat a chicken) and drove me to the emergency room.
And I resented the woman doctor who, after she extracted that damaging hunk of wood, pressed a Snoopy bandage over my wound, patted my head and gave me a sucker. “They never stop being little boys,” she whispered to my wife.
I would have snapped back at her, but I was busy with the sucker.
Being sick is no fun at all when there’s no one to hear you whine, er, to cluck over your list of ailments, bring you chicken noodle soup and to remind you that if you had moved out of that draft like she had told you to do, you’d be fine.
Say, do these words sound a little congested to you? That comma seems to be shivering. You know what else feels off…
If you can tolerate it, you can listen to the crybaby’s fussing and moaning at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or at the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook. Bring cough syrup.