I hate being sick. Obviously, no one is a fan of illness, but some people seem to be better at adapting to it, to tucking themselves into bed with a hot water bottle, Netflix and plenty of fluids.
To me, that doesn’t feel like the path back to good health, but lying in bed doing nothing. I start self-accusing: are you malingering? Are you really that sick? Too sick to get up and go to the bottle bank like you said you would? Invariably, I get up and go to the bottle bank and end up feeling worse.
This is, no doubt, due to multiple flaws in my personality. It’s also because I (luckily) don’t get sick very often. It’s an extreme rarity for me to have to take days off work: so, when it does happen, I assume that this is the beginning of the end. I check my will, leave instructions for the funeral and ponder the technicalities of having my ashes blasted into space.
A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly developed a night-time cough that was so severe I couldn’t sleep
Herself can talk me out of my health catastrophising because she’s a doctor. Not in the strict, medical qualification sense, but because she’s one of those people who somehow knows a lot about diseases and the treatments they require. My sister has the same eerie ability.
A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly developed a night-time cough that was so severe I couldn’t sleep. I spent hours hacking up while googling Death by Coughing and funeral venues. Herself told me I probably had a postnasal drip, which sounded gross but not too bad. Yet for some days, I didn’t do anything to confirm this. I suffer from a degree of irrationality when it comes to visiting a GP or any sort of doctor. I should regard it as a process where I’m getting something fixed – like bringing a car to a mechanic – but I don’t.
Not far below the surface lurks a fear that the doctor will ignore the symptoms I’m presenting with and instead unearth something far more serious: dispatching me to meet with a series of dark-faced consultants who will tut ominously and berate me for not having come to see them sooner.
I’m not alone in this. Years back, my father had to have emergency surgery, but refused an ambulance. He insisted on driving himself to the hospital – which was an hour away – because he didn’t want to make a fuss. And I remember being annoyed with him because, obviously, driving when you have a life-threatening condition is deeply irresponsible. But another part of me completely understood. I would have been tempted to do the same.
This is, it seems, a Man Thing. Men are far less likely to go to the doctor than women. One American survey found that most men would rather clean a toilet than visit a GP. Which tells you who normally does the toilet cleaning.
In one sense, this is counterintuitive, given that women have to routinely endure far more humiliating and invasive procedures than men do. You’d think they would be the reluctant ones. But men seem held back by a range of factors, which presumably vary depending on the male in question: they don’t wish to be viewed as weak or lacking stoicism. They find it embarrassing. They fear judgment. They fear there will be bad news. Being men, they don’t want to admit to fear and instead opt to avoid medical encounters altogether. It’ll probably get better by itself.
But sometimes it doesn’t. The coughing and lack of sleep eventually got to the point where I had to be a big, brave boy, take a day off work and go to the doctor. The GP looked in my throat and listened to my chest. She looked at her computer screen and sighed: as if weary at the self-destructive folly of people like me. Solemnly, she told me that I had a postnasal drip.
