I'm back, with coffee.
First, thank you for your honesty, Dravyk.
The difference between "being alone" and "being lonely" is huge, and horrifying when one encounters it.
Being sick strips you of your claim on adulthood. Everyone, male or female, is immediately turned into a child when they're sick. You've lost control over the one thing that is truly yours to claim: your body. Something as fundamentally simple as a cold (it's a virus, you can't prevent it, you can't cure it, but it's just a low-on-the-totem-pole virus) makes your body start doing all manner of disgusting, uncomfortable and painful things. This is the time when you want Mom (or whomever is playing the part of "Mom" in your own personal drama) to show up with the brand new boxes of tissue, the juice, the chicken soup, the "there, there, honey, you'll feel better soon." Whether you're male or female, you want this "Mom" person to show up. If the "Mom" person isn't there...welcome to true, agonizing loneliness. (You're not only sick as a dog, nobody loves you, you want to just eat worms and die.)
When I was a child, I made quite the habit of getting strep throat. (I didn't find out how truly sick I was this time until I was an adult and my Mom told me.) My father came home from work and I can still see him peeking his head around the corner of my room. He'd brought me Three Muskateers bars and comic books. I began to improve immediately. Well, somewhere in the one-long-conversation-over-coffee that has been my marriage, I told my husband that story. He mentally filed it away...and pulled it out once when I got sick. He had to go to a Comic Book Shoppe to find Wonder Woman, but he found her, and bought me Three Muskateers bars. (Never "cry for happy" when your sick, it does lousy things to your sinuses.)
Now, he just brings the candy and damned if it doesn't work.
He doesn't get sick often, but once he was absolutely bedridden. I made homemade soup and went out and got him a stack of magazines...including Playboy and Penthouse. (That still ranks as one of my favorite shopping experiences...ah the facial expressions!) He would add a parenthetical note here never to laugh that hard when you've got bronchitis, it hurts like hell.
Yes, men are quite the chore when they're sick, aren't they, ladies? However, what a lot of ladies don't realize is that they're looking in a mirror. I *know* I'm sullen and miserable to be around when I'm sick. All I want to do is curl up and die. I personally feel that I've done quite enough for the "having a condition cause," thank you very much, and should therefore be exempt from such pedestrian things as colds and the flu. However, that memo obviously wasn't sent out.
Note to FB: this has nothing to do with you or your comment anymore.
We've lapsed into one of those philosophical discussions that break out every one in a while.
Note to everybody: chicken soup really does work. The Jewish mothers of the world weren't making that up. They tested the stuff in a laboratory and all the scientists went
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