THAT'S MEN:Driving cattle, Superman, pleurisy and a caring, eagle-eyed wife, writes Padraig O'Morain.
I HAVE A childhood memory of my father insisting on driving cattle along the road to a mart in Kilcullen even though it was raining and even though he had been diagnosed with pleurisy.
By "driving" cattle I mean walking after them with a stick and a dog while they headed up every side-road they encountered.
I don't know what the treatment for pleurisy is but I'm pretty sure that walking after cattle in the rain is, as they say, "contra-indicated".
But my father got into that stubborn state that men get into about these things and was quite determined that pleurisy was not going to deter him from selling cattle, regardless of the consequences.
As it happened, there were no consequences. He survived both experiences.
Nevertheless, this type of behaviour in the face of illness is, I think, a particularly male thing and I was reminded of my father's stubbornness on reading of new research from Holland and the US on how couples react to a diagnosis of cancer.
The researchers found that if one member of a couple is diagnosed with cancer, the woman suffers more distress than the man. Even if it was the man who had the cancer, it was the woman who was the more distressed, according to a report on the research in the Psychological Bulletin.
"In practical terms, breast cancer patients are going to be, on average, more distressed than their husbands; but the wives of prostate cancer patients are going to be, on average, more distressed than their husbands," according to the study's lead author, Prof Mariët Hagedoorn.
In coming to their conclusions, the researchers analysed 43 studies from around the world on distress in couples with a cancer diagnosis. I wonder if this has something to do with men's resistance to "giving in" to illness? I have very often heard of women shaking their heads at their husbands' reluctance to go along freely with the treatment laid down by the doctors.
In many cases, though of course not all, it is left to the wife to oversee the medication regime, especially if it's complicated. If the doctor needs to be spoken to, that is left to the wife as well.
Some of what is going on here is a power struggle, I suspect. By accepting that you have an illness - cancer, pleurisy or anything else - you are putting yourself in a weak position in the sense that you are not the big, strong man you are expected to be.
Now along comes your wife with concern, advice, medication and an eagle eye - a caring eagle eye certainly, but an eagle eye nevertheless. This must be resisted in the same way that Superman must resist anyone who might suggest that he expose himself to green kryptonite.
But how do you resist? Why, by only grudgingly agreeing to take your medication, by forgetting out-patient appointments and by insisting on driving cattle along the road in the rain.
This behaviour is also linked, I think, to the "it's only a flesh wound" scenario in the movies. A bad guy fires a bullet through the hero's shoulder, an experience which would knock most of us into the day after tomorrow. Not our hero.
"It's only a flesh wound," he declares and carries right on, fighting the good fight, perhaps with a fainted female slung over the good shoulder. When it's all over, there's not a bother on him, except for the bullet holes in his shirt - and, with luck, that fainted female remembered to bring her sewing kit along.
By the way, that study also found, perhaps surprisingly, that cancer patients in general suffer only moderate levels of distress when compared with the general population.
"Only a minority of cancer patients suffer clinically significant distress," according to Hagedoorn.
"The myth that all cancer patients are distressed gets in the way of getting the proper attention to those patients who do become significantly distressed and who could benefit from a clinical intervention."
But that's another story. Meanwhile, what about all those stubborn men? We are, of course, in the 21st century, the era of the new man, so all that stuff really belongs to another age. We new men would never behave in such a silly way.
Would we?
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor and his blog is at www.justlikeaman.blogspot.com