Whining Floppy Man Self

By Rod Dreher • September 19, 2012, 9:23 AM

When I received a mono diagnosis last week, one of my wife’s friends said, “Now when he lays around whining, he has a good reason.”

For once! Here was what my day was like yesterday:

Up at 7 am. Drank my customary three large cups of coffee. Blogged. Back to sleep at 10. Woke up at noon, blogged, went back to sleep at 1:30. Woke up at 5. Blogged. Back to bed by 9.

I basically slept 16 or 17 hours out of 24 — and I still woke up tired. I’m really fortunate to have blog software that lets me get a bunch done while I’m awake, and spread out the posting. I can’t tell you how anxious I am about the work I’m not getting done, in part too because I often have a headache, and can’t focus well. It’s kind of freaking me out that my 78 year old father, who is not in the best health, is a lot more active these days than I am.

Did I mention to you my strange new respect for the infirm? This stuff is like the day you get the flu, all the time. Has been for a couple of months. Might last till Christmas.

Don’t pray for me — pray for my wife. She has to put up with my floppy, whining man self until then. And so we get to the point of this post: is there a difference between the way men and women react to illness? I mean, I’ve heard my wife and her friends observe that husbands complain and complain and complain when they get sick, whereas wives just suck it up and carry on. This could be a comic meme, but I suspect there’s some truth to it, though I can’t imagine why that would be. I appeal to my female readers for enlightenment.

UPDATE: It has not escaped my notice that my late sister, who had STAGE FOUR CANCER, never complained about how sick she was, and kept smiling and carrying on as if everything was fine.

Posted in Medical. Tagged mono, mononucleosis.

23 Responses to Whining Floppy Man Self

Mary Beth says:

September 19, 2012 at 9:38 am

I can only speak from my own experience. Back years ago when my son was small (he’s 27 now) my then husband and I caught a cold at the same time. Our symptoms seemed fairly similar, stuffy nose, sore throat, achey, low grade temp. My husband took to the couch asking to be brought tea and honey. He was there for 3 days droopy and unable to do anything but drag himself to the bathroom occasionally and to bed at night.
During the same period, while I had, as I said similar symptoms, I looked after our son, cooked meals, brought him his tea, did laundry etc etc. It was an eye opening experience. Now I’m unwilling to extrapolate from this that all men behave this way but I know one man who did.
Brian says:

September 19, 2012 at 9:44 am

We all love your blogging and all, but one might make the friendly suggestion that spending all of one’s 6-7 waking hours in front of a computer isn’t the most healthy lifestyle in the world.

This goes for so many of us in the modern world. Staring at these screens all day is not good, emotionally, mentally, physically, etc.
Beth says:

September 19, 2012 at 9:48 am

I would say that complaining versus not complaining has more to do with temperament than gender. My husband is a stoic type who rarely reacts to any discomfort. I , on the other hand being an emotional type, do a lot of complaining to elicit empathy/sympathy.
MikeS says:

September 19, 2012 at 9:49 am

When I get a cold, I tend reduce my activities and lie down a lot. My wife gets mad at me for this. “It’s only a cold” says she.
DeeAnn says:

September 19, 2012 at 10:19 am

I would say part of it is the fact that women usually are the main caregivers of the kids, and they don’t really care if you are sick, they still need to eat! But I also tend to take it easy when I get sick, because I find that I recover quicker that way. My husband will soldier on, but be sick for much longer and tends to have more chronic issues. Not sure if it’s related…
Pete Terranova says:

September 19, 2012 at 10:19 am

John Wayne would not consign himself to the couch if he had anything less than the cancer that finally killed him. He’d saddle up and ride right on through a cold or the flu or mono.
philosopher says:

September 19, 2012 at 10:28 am

Dude.

[Just to be clear, that should be heard as the "dude of sympathy", not, e.g., the "dude of mild disapprobation"]

Hey, were you doing all of the amazingly hard work of wrapping up the new book under these conditions?!? Yikes!
Sharon Astyk says:

September 19, 2012 at 10:44 am

You’ll have to convert to Judaism. In my faith, the right to whine is a sacrament .

Eric is by far the bigger whiner, but he turns it around and complains that I’m too stoic and just do it to make him look bad .

I’m with the above commenter that as much as I’d miss your blog, all screen time is tough on your recovery too.
Lulu says:

September 19, 2012 at 10:51 am

I swear to God, from the headline I thought this post was going to be about Romney’s whining about the press and flip-flopping on the issues!
em says:

September 19, 2012 at 10:53 am

My husband is one who rarely reacts to discomfort, culminating most recently in his going to the Dr for a slight abdominal pain and new tendency to start sweating upon light exertion, and finding he had days-old perforated appredicitis. That was dangerous. I say whiners are keeping ourselves safe.
marie says:

September 19, 2012 at 10:58 am

Women carry a child in their ever changing body for nine months and then give birth.
Pain is endured because everything passes.

My eye opener to this phenomena was in my late twenties working in hospitals. It was quite amazing to care for frail elderly women with late stage cancers who endured quietly while in terrible pain as opposed to young men who often arrived after motorcycle or car accidents with relatively minor injuries by comparison.
Rod Dreher says:

September 19, 2012 at 10:58 am

My late sister Ruthie was a world-class Stoic about pain and sickness. During her first year of teaching, she had abdominal pain for days, but ignored it, and carried on until she literally no longer could. She went to the doctor, and minutes later, she was having emergency surgery. She had had an ectopic pregnancy that burst her fallopian tube, causing internal bleeding. She could have died. Her surgeon told her she had no idea how on earth she stood up through all that pain, much less taught class. But that was how she was.
Matt from NE says:

September 19, 2012 at 11:00 am

What Beth said. I guess I’m a stoic like her husband. Work requirements also play a role, as DeAnn says: our first child is now in utero and thus doesn’t require the same kind of care. I have inflexible work obligations; my wife is self-employed. So I can’t flop around even if I want to, but my wife can sleep all day if necessary.
em says:

September 19, 2012 at 11:26 am

I can barely type one sentence without a typo but that one bothered me: of course I know it is appendicitis.
Mike says:

September 19, 2012 at 11:37 am

Recently spent three days in the hospital for a foot surgery. I didn’t complain, but I did try to get out a.s.a.p. and would have walked from the hospital to my office if the doctor had let me go back to work. I hated the idleness, and found that I was not able to focus on reading or anything else except TV. The week off work afterward was a bit better, but I’m not a complainer, just want to get on with it and back to normal life.
Dan Davis says:

September 19, 2012 at 11:43 am

My first wife had many health problems that finally got the best of her. But over the years she broke down and cried or complained maybe just two or three times, soldiering on through constant pain. I can’t speak for other men, but I don’t think I could have done it.
SusanKG says:

September 19, 2012 at 12:37 pm

My mother has had an to wear a bag that collects her urine for over 40 years after she suffered from bladder cancer at age age 45. During the past 40 years, she has also had to endure radiation-induced colitis. My dad was so stoic, but I can’t imagine that he could have endured this the way my mother has. She still says, “I thank the Lord every day. I lived to see my children grow up and my grandchildren born.” I think women gain an enormous amount of fortitude through pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and mothering.
EngineerScotty says:

September 19, 2012 at 12:44 pm

Whining about one’s health is a good sign, I suppose–those who are really sick, are often too sick to be a pain in the ass about it.
JonF says:

September 19, 2012 at 6:06 pm

I once read a theory that women, on the average, suffer less discomfort from illness than do men because they produce less of a chemical that helps transmit pain in response to illness (but not necessarily in response to injuries). Not sure if that’s solid, or just vaporware.
My mother, who rarely let any mere cold keep her down and out, was able to ignore her initial cancer symptoms (thinking they were the onset of menopause) until she turned jaundiced.
MMH says:

September 19, 2012 at 6:06 pm

My husband is the stoic, I’m the complainer. In my family at large–brothers, brother-in-law, father–the men are definitely stoics. Most of the women, other than I, aren’t complainers, either.
Naturalmom says:

September 19, 2012 at 9:56 pm

My husband is more stoic than I when it comes to illness, but if he’s tired, he’ll take to bed no matter what else is going on. Since I pretty much never have that luxury, it drives me nuts! But with illness, he seldom complains or babies himself.
Lewis Grant says:

September 19, 2012 at 11:43 pm

Hasn’t science demonstrated that under normal conditions, women deal with pain better than men, but under extreme conditions, men deal with pain better than women? I can’t recall the source, but I’m pretty sure I’ve read that more than once.
marie says:

September 20, 2012 at 2:45 pm

From what I have read in Medical studies, testosterone and adrenalin seem to react together in a male to blunt the pain during stress. For example, when boxing or fighting. However , the female is a little more complicated hormonally speaking and she holds up better dealing with prolonged physical pain. Emotional stress is another story altogether. Men can push one situation aside mentally and focus on something else
( although they often do not recognize physical symptoms associated with stress).Whereas, women have more trouble getting the stressful problem out of their mind no matter what they do to distract themselves. IMHO We need each other as parents and spouses in order to
stabalize all the pressures of today’s society and culture that assault family life.
Did your wife ask you WHO you were kissing to contract momo? LOL Or, did she laugh it off as a valid reason to lay around? LOL
The latter probably means you have been married quite awhile