London - At first I just ignored him. After all he is my husband and experience has taught me that often the most efficient way to deal with a sick husband is to ignore it.
Then it will go away and come back when it’s better. But, in the end, the noises Mr Candy was making became so intrusive I felt obliged to give him some attention.
He was grunting dramatically like the excessively loud tennis player Maria Sharapova every time he moved.
“What’s the matter?” I inquired, hoping the reply would take less than two minutes.
There was, as usual, a lot to do at home: the pet shop was about to shut and I had to get a sample of water from our “death tank” to them before any more of our unlucky fish popped their clogs.
“The pain is so bad now I can’t move,” he said feebly. He’d been lying on the living room floor for the best part of Sunday.
“I can’t really feel my leg and my back is agony,” he continued breathlessly as I watched the clock out of the corner of my eye. “It’s getting much worse,” he wailed, before launching into an unnecessarily lengthy and detailed description of his bad back.
“Do you want me to take you to hospital?” I asked, teeth slightly gritted. It seemed the polite thing to say, though I hoped the answer would be no. Sunday afternoons are laden with to-dos.
The pre-school list of chores is a long one, which can’t be delegated to a helper drafted in to look after the four children while I sit in casualty for hours until some one tells us to take some Nurofen and come back if the symptoms don’t improve (this has happened before).
Besides Mr Candy had been missing in action on the parenting front for three days since the pain first took hold. We’d been a man down over a busy weekend and my patience was wearing thin.
I’d been on solo duty for two nights with a vomiting toddler. Unfortunately the sympathy store was empty.
“You need to go to the doctor first thing,” I told him, “And sort this out or you’ll have to live in the garage where no one can hear you scream.”
Why do men resist visiting the GP? He could have gone on Friday, instead he thought quick self diagnosis on the internet and some lily-livered painkillers would provide a magic cure. He had to be better by Monday not least because Monday is maths homework night. Mr C does the maths.
But things got worse, not better. It turns out he had slipped a disc.
He really was properly, officially, medically hurt — not just “man-hurt” where the suffering is disproportionate to the condition.
By Wednesday my broken co-parent was flat on his back full-time after an injection in his spine. He was told not to move for a week, and faces months of physiotherapy.
“God that injection was painful,” he murmured from his bed.
“As painful as an epidural after you’ve been in labour for three days?” I wanted to say, my selfish, over-tired fury reaching volcanic levels as I settled down to do yet more complicated vulgar fractions with the 11-year-old.
Was it as painful as, say, four C-sections? As painful perhaps as breast feeding? I doubt it, Mister.
I know it’s wrong to compare your partner’s level of suffering with what you endured during childbirth but any woman who doesn’t harbour illogical fantasies of “revenge pain” is a saint. Or on Prozac for her false memory syndrome.
“Women suffer more, but men suffer worse,” as a friend of mine is fond of quoting when her husband retires to his bed with a cold.
Anyway I have reached into the emotional vault and summoned up the necessary sympathy because, poor love, he really is in quite a lot of pain.
And he’s missed the ten-year-old’s first guitar recital, the seven-year-old’s assembly and two parents’ evenings.
On the upside he can’t hear the two older sisters bickering like hellcats of a morning from his bed and he didn’t have to make an almost life-size model of a “religious building” for the eldest’s homework.
Every now and again he lies on the floor in the lounge for a change of scenery.
When our two-year-old encounters him there she crosses her arms and sighs.
“Dad you need to take some more Calpol,” she says. - Daily Mail
* Lorraine Candy is editor-in-chief- of ELLE magazine.