Incapacitated!

First published in Column 8 on the 28^th August, 1991

The Central Intelligence System is under attack!

The main air ducts to the outside world resound with continuous explosions. The two large video screens steam with condensation. And, if they’re not already in this state, it’s likely in the near future that the two loudspeakers will crackle and splutter until their sound ceases altogether. At present all noise is interrupted by a static-like coughing and choking.

Yes folks, it’s time for the Annual Cold.

For weeks I’ve worn the unmentionable long johns and weather the withering looks of my with-it kids – and kept their colds at bay. And mentioning the kids, for weeks I’ve avoided their germ-laden, cold-filled kisses and cuddles, all the while trying to maintain my normal fatherly relationship with them.

For weeks I’ve slid down the hill on unmelting ice in the vehicle that replaced my old Holden – in which I would have felt, if not actually been, safer – and avoided running into other traffic and into any colds.

Finally last week my resistance gave up the ghost and laid me flat on my back. For everything from the neck down it was work as usual. Only the section that keeps everything else in order – the head – was out of action.

(In fact, the glare from my word processor was too much to cope with. Thus this column is a first: dictated from my sickbed to my 10-year-old typist.)

Talking of heads, having a cold always brings to a head a point of contention in the battle of the sexes that my wife and I epitomise. She always asserts, in line with other wives to their equally beleaguered husbands, that I make a terrible fuss about having a cold. She says that when women have colds they have to grin and bear it. Women, she says, don’t have time to stop for colds. They certainly don’t have time to go to bed for a day and a half. She then proves her point by carrying on regardless when hit by the bug.

I maintain, along with the aforesaid beleaguered husbands, that men suffer far more than women when they have a cold. It’s a well known fact that men’s skins are thinner; surely that gives us less protection. Consequently we’re more afflicted when a cold strikes us.

This cuts no ice with my wife. Once I have a cold, she follows her normal policy of maintaining a polite distance and ignoring my cries for aid. I lie upon my sick bed. If I am not at death’s door, then I am in view of it.

I have found it to be a strange phenomenon that women always accuse men of making a fuss about being sick. Yet we gentlemen would seldom dare tell a woman who is sick that she’s not.

I have to say ‘seldom,’ otherwise my wife would point out that on one historic occasion I didn’t believe she was ill until she proved it by winding up in hospital.  

I was up in Hamilton recently, and spent time with a couple who have two teenage daughters. When the husband questions his health, as he has had good reason do so lately, the three females in his establishment tell him not to fuss so much. He hasn’t even got a son to back him up.

Perhaps all we men are looking for is a little sympathy, a little mollycoddling in our state of ill repose. Perhaps we  hope for a little more understanding from women, that in one area at least they’ll realise we’re the weaker sex.

As for the idea that men’s skin is thinner than women’s, it appears I was misinformed. In general, men’s skin is approximately 20% thicker than women’s, is tougher in texture, and though its thickness declines with age, it does so at a more even rate than women’s. On the other hand, women have a tendency to be more immune to common illnesses. ‘Women generally mount a more robust, innate and adaptive immune response against viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitic infections,’ says Google’s AI, quoting, or paraphrasing some study on the Net. (We hope.)

It’s slightly puzzling to me why I referred to the machine I typed on as a word processor, both here and in two other columns: here and here. It was a computer; we’d debated about getting a word processor, when such things existed, and thankfully decided against what would have proved to be its limitations. (Thanks to my wife’s insistence, mostly.)