For the last couple of months I have been in a state of anxiety for quite a large proportion of the time because of a recurrent pain in the chest.
It wasn’t a severe pain so I could manage most things without bother and every time my sensible half would tell me to get it checked out my foolish half would instantly pooh pooh any such insanity.
I gave myself very good reasons for this- going to the doctor would make me look a fool because there was nothing wrong except indigestion and/or he would have to send me on for further tests anyway where I would be probed and poked at, all for nothing. There is, I think, a very strong inclination in men to avoid for as long as possible any contact with a medicine man based on such slender reasons as that such contact will result in embarrassment.
At a party recently I heard two (English) men discuss their dosage of tablets “I mean, I don’t know” said one to the other “There was nothing wrong ‘till I went and saw the Doctor” It is as if the concept of preventative medicine had by-passed a whole sex.
Of course when I was sufficiently laid low that I had to admit to myself and then my wife that something needed to be done, and actually made the appointment to see a doctor, the relief was immediate. I was now putting the whole responsibility on someone else’s shoulders and all my anxieties and secret fears dissipated.
The rest, for anyone who has been reading my last few blogs, is history. I had a problem, and a couple of hours on an operating table fixed it completely. I emerged from the hospital (well clinic officially) a new man, re energised, recharged and (more or less) anxiety free. There was not, as far as I can remember any moments of embarrassment- from the moment I stepped into my doctor’s office and described my symptoms his first words to me were: “You were right to come and see me.” The first words the cardiologist said were: “Yes, we have a job to do here” all enormously reassuring to a man with a morbid fear of seeming to be a hypochondriac.
I suppose it would be too optimistic a thought to hope that this would make either me of Josef Savon mend their ways and become a little more open in matters of health but I feel obliged to put it down, to tell my, nearly sixty three year old, self not to be such an ass the next time.