I had a man-cold this week, and as my friend Nurse Ninny knows, there is nothing worse than a man-cold. 

“You men are such babies when you get a cold,” she said to me one time years ago. “When a woman gets a cold, she still gets out of bed, gets the kids ready for school, feeds them breakfast, does the dishes, gets ready for work, goes to work, comes home and gets supper on the table for the family.  A man stays in bed all day and rings a little bell and asks for someone to bring him the remote so he doesn’t have to get out of bed to change channels!”

That was when I first explained to her that the reason men APPEAR to be wimpier about colds is simply because our colds are so much more severe than their colds.

It has taken me 14 years, but I think she is finally about ready to concede  the truth of it.

Aches, chills, runny nose, cough, tired, tired, tired----I could barely LIFT the remote to change channels, let alone push the buttons.

We are “baby sitting” for our sons pets, so we have our own two, Wrigley W. Whitehouse, the dog and Riley Wiley Porter, the cat, plus Wesley and Bugsy Salvatore Bonnacci, his dog and cat.

Marsha had one of her relentless work schedules this week that had her leaving the house at 8:00 a.m. and returning at 11:00 p.m. every night. This left me alone in the house, totally incapacitated with my man-cold, with nobody to help me except the four animals.

They were no help at all.

Wesley drinks 8 bowls of water every day, if we don’t remember to put the lids down.  He also drinks 10 dishes of water. This means that he has to go outside 112 times.  Wrigley is not as frequent a drinker or quite the pianist that Wesley is, but, he does have this conformity thing. 

 When Wes decides to go out, Wrigley always says, ‘Uh, no thanks, I guess I’ll stay inside this time.”

Then, when I come back inside after putting Wes in the back yard, Wrigs is waiting at the door, saying, “Excuse me, but I changed my mind.  I do want to go out after all.”

I take him out, but by this time, Wes is ready to come in.  Wrigley is much, much slower about doing his business.  He’s a sniffer.  He has to sniff everywhere, and thoroughly.  I wait, and wait, and wait. By the time he’s ready to come in, Wes has emptied a couple more toilets and three more dishes of water and needs to go out again.

Then there is Bugsy.  (Riley is no trouble at all.  He stays in our bedroom all day, hiding from everyone else.) 

Bugsy likes to dash for the door and escape to the great outdoors. Since we open the door 433 times every day doing the dog-pee-and-poop drill, he has many opportunities to make his break.

So, what we do is pick him up and take him out with us in our arms.  He seems satisfied to look around and to watch the dogs in the back yard. It does add to the complexity of coming and going, and makes bringing groceries into the house virtually impossible---we lock him in the laundry room when we do that job.

You can imagine what it was like to try to enjoy my man-cold in my big green La-Z-Boy chair-- the one with its own zip code-- while tending to the constant demands of these furry boys. It wasn’t fair.  I may as well have had a woman-cold. 

                            © by Jim Whitehouse

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