Why do I get a cold, but my husband always the flu?
Created: Tuesday, April 02, 2002
“Disease generally begins that equality which death completes” Samuel Johnson
Most women have had the experience of being ill – really ill – and still being expected to run the household, look after the children and cook the evening meal. If a woman wants to see exactly what she does with her life, she should try spending a day in bed.
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Dishes will pile up, dirty laundry will multiply faster than the speed of light and the rest of the family will be difficult – husband included – because their source of emotional security is lying in bed snivelling, retching and hacking.
The family also has a tendency to feel neglected and will come running with minor ailments in an effort to elicit sympathy to which they feel they are entitled.
The feeling of helplessness a woman feels is indescribable when asked what there is for supper when she has not had a desire to eat anything for two days.
It is strange that in most families, when husbands or children get ill, they often expect the kind of five-star treatment, which they don’t give you when you are ill. Your husband is very good at doing the death’s door act – he can hardly move and lies in bed groaning as if the Grim Reaper is about to whisk him off. But he got the flu from you, and he was the one who asked you what there was for supper!
A husband who is sick often feels totally helpless and easily feels neglected. Oddly enough, there is also often a great reluctance to take medication. It is easier to get a tablet down the cat’s throat than to get your husband to take a vitamin tablet.
re is only one solution to this dilemma – give all the sympathy you can, but write down what you have done during his death’s door experience and hand the page to him when you feel the first symptoms of your next flu bout appearing.
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