I Can No Longer Function

The tragic story of a man whose wife thought he just had a cold

 

His wife was called in to talk to the doctor alone, while Dan waited outside in the waiting room, sniveling and staring at the floor.

“He’s got a cold, right?” said Clara, to the doctor.

“It’s worse than that I’m afraid,” said the doctor, ominously. “Dan’s suffering from a man cold.”

“Not again!” said Clara.

“I’m afraid so,” said the doctor.

“Alright, let’s go,” said Clara curtly, returning to the waiting room and not really waiting for the slow moving Dan as she headed to the parking lot. She knew what was expected of her now, and she was resentful. She was expected to be all nurturing and faux-worried. Oh poor baby, et ceterea. I made you chicken soup from scratch.

Been there, done that.

“What did the doctor say?” croaked Dan through his exaggeratedly hoarse voice. And then he added a couple of hacking coughs for effect.

“He said you were going to die and there is nothing we can do about it,” said Clara.

Clara was jesting, of course. A man cold is not fatal. It is always near-fatal. Men act like they are on the verge of death when they have it. Act is the operative word.

Scientists have confirmed that the man cold is only twenty to thirty percent worse than a regular cold.

“That is only because men are twenty to thirty percent bigger babies than women,” said Dr. Roxana Avila, of the New Age Medical Society.

Clara was well aware of this fact, having married the man of her dreams only to discover on the occasion of his first stuffy nose that he was, like all other men on the planet earth, nothing but a big baby.

She drove Dan home, and was walking him upstairs to bed, when he decided to lie down, right there on the stairs, face down.

“I can no longer function,” he whined. “I can no longer move.”

“OK, stay here, I’m going back to work. See ya.”

Dan waited there on the stairs for a little while. Surely she was kidding. She was a kidder, his Clara. But then she heard her car pulling out of the driveway and he knew she wasn’t kidding. He was left there face down on the stairs to deal with his man cold alone.

After five minutes of lying there he felt bored.

He got up, went into the bathroom, took a couple Nyquil and got himself into bed.

Unfortunately it would be another 24 to 48 hours before the cold fully passed.

How Dan faced those grueling hours of congestion, mucus, coughing and sore throat without throwing in towel is a mystery.

And a triumph of the human spirit.

“There’s another way of looking at the man-cold that is perhaps less demeaning of the male,” said Masculinity Expert Mark Sorenstein. “Men feel so much pressure to perform, to achieve and to excel that the idea of having to spend a few days resting in bed is anathema to them. If they can’t function, they feel useless. And in some primal way, they feel they are dying to the tribe. And will be soon abandoned.”

So what can women do to help a man through these crises?

“Nyquil,” said Sorenstein. “It’s an awesome drug. Or even better, whiskey with honey and lemon. Cup after cup. That’s what men need.”

So there you have it women. You don’t have to be all maternal. We don’t need you to stroke our hair or spoon feed us soup.

Bring us some whiskey with lemon and honey in it, could you? I mean, that wouldn’t be too terribly much to ask?

Cough cough…

Would it?