Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Men and illness

As most readers would know, I'm a nurse. At the moment I work with babies and their mums.I used to work with pregnant and laboring mums. Before that I worked with men (primarily) in a male surgical ward (and orthopedics).
Working in orthopedics Means that you mostly look after: old women who fall over and break a hip, usually a neck of their femur(thigh bone). It's the thinnest part right at the top of the bone and so very prone to breakage in our osteoporotic elderly citizens. They generally need hip replacements, screws etc. Almost without fail when you get them up for a shower post op they pee on your feet. That's why there are gumboots for the nursing staff to wear when showering patients.
Then you get to look after men who have accidents. Some road traffic ones (whether motorbike or automobile), some shed ones, my favorite. The shed ones tend to happen more commonly around Christmas time. The men get a power tool, a skinful of grog and head on out to the shed to try out the new drill, saw etc. Cue the blood/tendon/ligament injuries. Yesss.
Then I worked in male surgical. Urology (prostates and kidney stones), ENT (ear, nose & throat) as well as general surgery. Anh, yes I remember the sputum mugs well from ENT (shudder). Ask any nurses about sputum mugs, we all have our personal waterloos.
I have found (from personal experience/anecdotal evidence, which, I might add, is a highly underrated method or research) that men fall into 2 categories of patients.
1. The wimp. They are the sort that believe that every cold is a deadly flu and take to their beds accordingly. In hospital they use narcotic pain relief accordingly. They will also argue with the nurses about why they should have it when they're sitting happily in an arm chair beside their bed (I may be exaggerating here).
2. The hero/idiot. This particular patient thinks it's girly/wimpy/whatever to admit that something is wrong with them. They will suffer in "silence", like they're fooling people. They would crawl with their bleeding stumps behind them to do a days work and say it was only a scratch while quietly going white in the corner. They refuse pain relief while fidgeting ferociously, saying that they're ok (sadly I'm not exaggerating unlike with the bleeding stumps scenario). We can all recognize these types. We are either married to/living with/related to one of them. I'm married to example No 2.
When 19 he got hit by a flying brick in the abdomen from a brick truck while on his motorbike. He subsequently had a laparotomy (fancy way of saying they opened him right up), they took his spleen out, sewed up his liver and a kidney. He discharged himself a week later, having lied and said his mother would be home to look after himself (she went to work). That is JUST 1 example of his foolishness. I could go on but it gets boring and repetitive. He found out that he needed his gall bladder out late last year. There was a long and involved path to his surgery, including disruption to gas supplies due to the floods, a fun night in an emergency department with abdominal pain, a lot of shouting from me (such things as: FFS just take some pain relief and no sausages for you), but we finally got there. He survived pain free the trip to the US (the wait staff always looked confused when I said I was having the burger and him the salad) and the lead up to the op. He did once voice the opinion that he might be ok and not need the op because he hadn't had any pain for ages, to which the shouting recommenced.

That was not the end of the whole sorry saga. No, no, no. Then there was the "I don't need a sick certificate/certificate for light duties, or even to take it easy. He went back to work q week later, trying to ignore the whole episode and when he came down with a virus 2 weeks later ended up going yellow. So we ended up back at the hospital. Ahhh, the circle of life.

I will follow up part 1 of the illness story with part 2: emergency department.

Don't think women are perfect patients. They're not, but their painfulness is more diffuse, if you will. They cover a broader spectrum that way. I may (when I work it out) write about them.

Do you have a story about men/males and their illness? Love to hear about it.

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