Louisa Simmonds

Is there anything worse than a man who is sick?

Or who thinks he is?

Is there any greater test of a woman’s capacity to love, than when her partner suffers from a bad case of Man Flu?

Given the choice, I’d prefer to go on a three-week Paleo diet and put naked ‘before and after’ shots of my muffin top on my school’s Facebook page than look after the old man when he has a cold the flu.

This is just one of the areas that men are the weaker sex.

A woman gets a cold and life continues as normal. A man gets a cold and they expect the world to stop revolving while they plan their funeral.

Perhaps our maker invented man flu to try and instill some empathy in women? Or more likely – to test our superior strength, like he did with menstruation, childbirth and menopause.

I had to lie in bed last night and listen to the old man as he hacked and spluttered and spread his vile germs thoughtlessly all over our clean sheets. Frankly, a cockroach would have make a much more appealing bed partner.

Just saying, but he could have gone to the spare room so that one of us could have got some sleep.

But the worst thing about the old man when he thinks he’s sick is that he dons my dressing gown, which I find strangely revolting.

He truly believes that he attracts a far more virulent case of whatever sickness the rest of the family is exposed to. He packed me off to the pharmacy this morning to buy flu medication and a thermometer. When the pharmacist assured me that all he really needed for the flu was Panadol, I had to insist on a product with the word ‘flu’ on the packaging, just to appease him.

She smiled knowingly.

I invested in some surgical masks while I was there.

But there is one true test of the flu – you don’t eat when you have the flu. So if you can still ram a large bowl of cereal down your neck and demand comfort food in bed, it’s definitely a cold, I begin to get a little skeptical. 

The old man disagrees. As he dragged his aching body out of bed to fix himself some breakfast, he quoted in that affected, sick way, ‘ feed a cold and feed a fever, Lou. I need to get my strength back up.’

#manflu #Health #men #ConditionsandDiseases #Humor #Influenza #Marriage