In my first post, I talk about Nathan needing emergency gallbladder removal several years ago. While that was scary and a challenging time in our relationship, I have never really talked about the events leading up to such a dramatic event. And while one of my fabulous column colleagues, Tamara Star, has talked about the need to ease up on men in a really comprehensive way I am a person that thrives on real-world examples and I suspect that I’m not the only one.
During the day leading up to the surgery, Nathan was extremely sick. It was a regular workday and it was also a day our oldest (at the time, only) daughter went to daycare instead of going to her grandmas. Prior to this experience, I was someone who really bought into the notion of the “man cold” so I thought that what Nathan must be feeling wasn’t really that bad. As a result, I was pretty rude to him that morning. I was annoyed that our schedule was being thrown off for something that he could just sleep off. Annoyed, I asked if he wanted me to drop off Elizabeth and then come back to bring him to the emergency room or if he wanted me to make a clinic appointment. I thought his preference to see our primary care physician was a sign that he must really not be that sick. As I arrived at work that day, I will admit that I—a self-identified feminist—was semi-openly mocking my spouse for being so needy.
I got to work and chatted in to our clinic to set up the appointment. At the right time, I left work, and picked up Nathan (who said he was feeling a little bit better, and so my annoyance turned to anger), and brought him to the clinic. It was there we discovered his white blood cell count was dangerously high, and our primary care physician sent us to the emergency room. The emergency room staff did an ultrasound and discovered some small stones. They decided it was not an emergency and sent us home. Our primary care physician was livid, called upon her professional connections, and the next day Nathan was in an operating room with a skilled (if egotistical) surgeon. The surgeon reported back to me, let me know that the surgery had gone well, and that Nathan’s gallbladder was almost completely necrotized and that those “small stones” the emergency room staff had seen the day before were actually two stones about the size of a standard sized marble.
If we want to live in a society where people ask for the help that they need, we need to ditch this notion that they don’t really need the help.
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For a year and a half, my spouse had been having these attacks on nearly a monthly basis and I had been writing them off as a “man cold.” With each attack, one of his internal organs was slowly dying and because of the influence the patriarchy had over my way of thinking, I thought it was no big deal. I thought that he was really fine and if he would only eat a little better he would stop having all this intestinal trouble.
If we want to live in a society where people ask for the help that they need, we need to ditch this notion that they don’t really need the help. Feeling overwhelmed or being in pain are not competitions. Just because you think someone’s challenges are not that bad doesn’t mean they don’t need help. And for all you know, it really could be that bad and your refusal to acknowledge the suffering of another could do some serious damage to that person.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock