Doctor, Doctor, Give Me The News

If your husband is like mine, he'd pretty much do anything to avoid going to a doctor's office. I'm not sure if it's a man thing ("Unh, big scary man in white coat bad.") or if men are just really good at denial. I truly think that he's under the impression that no news is good news and just takes it to a whole new level.

I've been trying to get my husband to get regular check ups for, oh, the entire time we've been married. I'm not sure if it's because of my persistence that's breeding his resistance but it's extremely frustrating. His opinion is that doctors always find something wrong. So if you don't go, you're healthy. This is such guy thinking. If you're sick and don't know it, you're still sick Einstein.

Because this is such a frustrating issue, I of course have been taking a poll of all the women closest to me to see if their husbands are as big of block heads concerning going to the doctor. Only to find that 95% of their husbands have the same doctor phobia. Perhaps it's something in a man's genetic code that says he has to be so macho that he will cut his own arm off rather than go to the hospital and get it fixed. Heck, maybe it's decades of fathers telling their sons to "Rub some dirt in it, you'll be fine." that has become so ingrained that it's second nature now.

Within the last year or so, hubby has developed a persistent, dry cough. He doesn't even notice that he's doing it. I'm trying to do my wifely duty (nagging) to have him get it checked out. The big problem is, left on my own, I'm going to seek answers from other sources. If he's not going to go to the doctor, I'm going to talk to people, do Google searches, and scour Web MD. It starts out benign enough: acid reflux, post nasal drip, sinus infection. Then the scary illnesses follow: lung infections, heart failure, cancer. What started out as a minor worry that he needs to get a check up now morphs into an insane fear that he's going to die from some exotic disease that he has all the symptoms of. (Too much knowledge CAN be a dangerous thing.) And he knows me, so he knows that I can swing from normal to paranoid in 3.6 seconds. I really think he should have seen this coming.

What men don't realize is that they can save themselves a lot of grief and wifely lectures if they just go to the damn doctor already. It's not like we're asking you to donate your eyeballs to charity. We're not asking you to cut off your scrotum. We just want you to go visit the nice man in the white coat. (No, not that white coat, the other white coat. The ones that require less Prozac ) How can you not want to know? Maybe this is why they get married. They don't want to know and women do. Perfect match! Until they still don't want to know and you still do.....and then it's just back to nagging and lectures.