Living with 'man flu'

All of you woman out there, have you ever had a cold? the flu? stomach bug?  How have you dealt with this? Maybe taken some sort of painkiller, decongestant, herbal tea? Maybe we have even taken to bed for a couple of days, struggling to the kitchen to make tea or a couple of slices of plain toast. Generally, no big deal.  These minor illnesses happen, we deal with them and then they pass.

Yesterday my husband came down with a cold.  This clearly was an illness of tragic proportions.  The number of moans, groans, requests for hot drinks and demands for sympathy were extraordinary.  I was even berated for forgetting to tell the poor man to take paracetemol for the achiing muscles he had.  Last week my brother had one day (!!) of some sort of stomach bug.  Oh my god, within minutes he was labelling it the norovirus. I believe the diagnosis of something as formal as norovirus sounds much better than I have what my dad sweetly refers to as a 'loose stomach'.  Both of these dreadfully ill men are now better.

Women do it better. Of this I'm certain and yet the medical profession does not take women as seriously when they present with symptoms of illnesses that may be difficult to diagnose.  My mother was feeling extremely unwell for about a year before she was eventually diagnosed as having colon cancer.  She saw her doctor and complained of extreme tiredness and exhaustion. She was 74 years old, retired and generally in good health up until that time.  The first treatment she was given was a prescription for anti-depressants.  By the time she had the correct tests and the accurate diagnosis her cancer had spread and was terminal. My aunt was treated in a similar fashion.  So was my mother-in-law. 

Would men be told that their symptoms were connected to their moods?  Would men accept such a diagnosis?  I think there is still a difference in the way men and women are treated by the medical profession and women always come out worse.  Maybe we should all start making more noise, complaining more and certainly demanding more.  Not necessarily from those we live with, but from those medical gatekeepers to treatment. 

This brings me to my most recent vague and irritating lapses of attention. I arrived back from NY last Wednesday.  I was jet-lagged and pre-occupied.  It took me a few days to land in London and I still don't feel really here.  Annoyingly I forgot that I had booked and paid for non-refundable tickets to the Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy. Great exhibition apparently.  All booked up now.  We missed it last Friday evening.  Then there was a phone call on my answering machine yesterday.  I missed a dental appointment.  Completely forgot all about it.  Write these things down, I hear you say.  I do, but then I forget where I noted them.  Was it on my iPod, my computer, my old-fashioned filofax? I am going to start writing things down in three of four places to make sure that I see them.  I certainly can't trust memory.

My memory is actually not bad.  It's my concentration that's not great.  I find that I can't do more than one thing at a time.  Something inevitably suffers, so I've started being very male and single-minded about things.  No more multi-tasking pretence. 

Just had to stop for a minute - I just burned the lamb curry.  I forgot it was still cooking.  I'm sure if I went to my doctor about this I would be prescribed anti-depressants.  Who knows???