Man and Bird Flu

I’m sick. It’s not all that surprising considering that I’ve spent the past week living with two sick teen boys. The kind of teen boys who think that the coffee table is the bin for germ filled tissues and that the place to send a sneeze is across the room, especially when I’m in the firing range. But despite all that, I just didn’t expect to get sick because after all, I’m the one who has to mind all the sickies, so who the hell can run to the chemist and get overpriced paracetemol, a forest worth of tissues and a few dozen movies except my good self?

But damn, it looks like I too have gotten the ‘man flu’. I call it that because I understand man flu as meaning you have a bit of the sniffles and you’re going over the top about it. Well truth is, women can get the man flu too, and I’m one of them. I’ve coughed and  sneezed a few times, my throat is a bit sore and I do have a certain amount of aches and pains, but I’m so precious about myself and such a man when it comes to illness that I definitely feel ‘man flu’ is a feminist issue, and I’m a feminist who’s suffering from it. I’ve crawled off the sofa to write this blog though, cos after all, I’m so sick, it might be my last ever piece of writing. I’ve had a few hot whiskeys and whatever combination of over the counter drugs you can combine without actually dying, and I do feel a bit woozy, but that has nothing to do with the medication and alcohol, it’s because I’m seriously ill, and as if that’s not bad enough, nobody cares.

The main difference between women and men when they have the man flu is that women still make the dinner and throw on a wash and have a bit of a wobbler before they collapse onto the sofa, whereas men only collapse onto the sofa.

So the teen boys are better now. You know that teen boys are better when they start saying that they’re still really really sick, but they say it whilst tucking into a large steak and chips and fighting with each other. But me, I’m still sick. O.K., I did have a bit of steak but the chocolate was just comfort food to help my illness and the whiskey is, of course, for my throat or something.

So I’ll lie here on the sofa until the ambulance comes and hopefully, I’ll pull through. After all, we women need to get better quicker than men as we have things to attend to, like having babies and periods and stuff like that, which, come to think of it, gives us all the more reason to get sick as it reminds us of our other sickly duties.

Granted, I do manage to work full time and still make the dinner whilst doing all this moaning, but in fairness, the boys managed to walk down to the shops and do some ice cream shopping for their poor sore throats when they had it, so after all that it just goes to show that man flu or bird flu, we’re all equals…