By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male
There is nothing tougher on a man than to
find that his woman thinks he’s a wimp.
Yes, she may make a halfhearted attempt to hide her feelings, but a man
recognizes the look. You know the
one. Her chin drops just a little and
turns ever so slightly to the right. By
itself that’s no big deal, but when she adds the wrinkled brow, squinted eyes,
pursed lips, and one raised eyebrow, serious psychological damage to the man’s
ego is sure to follow.
My own journey into the dark world of
wimpism began, innocently enough, more than fifteen years ago in a doctor’s
office. I think the Doctors words were,
“How much sugar did you say you put on
your oatmeal?” I was brave enough
during the ensuing glucose tolerance test.
It was, after all, sugar, my favorite food. It was later, after the diagnosis, that I
realized that my life was about to become one long needle poke. Ann, my wife, thought that it was only
justice for my having ignored her exemplary dietary example all these years,
but I think she comes from a long line of medieval torture-rack designers and
is without sympathy. I think one of
those ancestors designed the blood-sugar tester I use.
The bloodletting device contains a
spring-loaded needle about a foot long with barbs at the end. It must be cocked and then released to stab
the finger severely, but in a way that only partially severs the digit. The torture part comes when the testee is
required to turn a dial to set the depth of plunge, thus being to blame for his
own pain.
My first three attempts were with the
dial set to “ultra-low poke,” thus assuring that I wouldn’t get enough blood
out of any one hole to fill the test strip.
So, I did what any real man would do, I scraped the three microscopic
samples together into one contaminated drop big enough to do the job. The meter analyzed the sample and quickly
spelled out “WIMP” in oversized capital letters. Ann pumped her fist in the air and said, “Yes.”
It has been my practice to only check my
sugar first thing in the morning when I get out of bed. Ann, my wife who thinks I am a wimp, wants me
to check my sugar level multiple times a day; first thing in the morning before
breakfast and an hour after I finish breakfast, just before lunch and an hour
after lunch, just before I exercise and an hour after I exercise, just before
dinner and an hour after dinner, and just before I go to bed. I claim that I can take my sugar once a day
and know immediately whether I had been a good boy or a bad boy the day
before. She claims that I need to take
my sugar multiple times a day so that she can determine which of the sneaky things
I do during the day causes my sugar to go up.
I told her that if I took blood that often there wouldn’t be enough
blood left to keep me alive. “Ha,” she snorted. “It
wouldn’t be that much blood. You never
exercise.” And then she called me a
wimp again.
Well now I am going to let the world know
the truth. Once every year or two Ann
asks me to check her blood sugar to make certain that she hasn’t caught
diabetes through exposure to me. And
then she curls up in a fetal position in the corner and holds out her trembling
pinky finger while she whimpers, “Please
don’t hurt me.” So, who’s the real
wimp.
Bob Stevens
muddledmale@gmail.com
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