(An excerpt from Hearty Masculinity)
A
few years back, I went to that national Adult Congenital Heart Association
convention down in Florida. It was amazing, I got to meet tons of people who
had similar health backgrounds to me; people born with a congenital heart
condition. I couldn’t help but notice the ratio of women to men was incredibly
skewed. I eventually got around to asking someone what was up with that, and
her ominous response was, “they drop out.”
She
didn’t mean they join the group and then decide it isn’t for them. She meant
men with congenital heart conditions drop out of care, they stop seeing their
doctors about their hearts, and eventually they die. I gotta say, this seems
unimaginable to me, irresponsible, embarrassing. I initially thought maybe it
was some sort of stigma for men with heart conditions like mine, but having
talked to friends and done some googling, it seems we men are choosing
not to take care of ourselves! As Rev. Angela Denker, who wrote the book Disciples
of White Jesus points out, “In an April 2023 study, the Washington Post
showed that men in the United States were likely to live nearly six years fewer
than women, the largest gender-based gap in life expectancy in twenty-five
years.”[1]
I know it is a
pain, but going to routine yearly medical examinations is a must. It
establishes a relationship between you and a doctor, and gives them a working
baseline of what is “normal” for your body. On top of that, they can also catch
things early, so what might otherwise have been a tragedy is instead a minor
inconvenience.
For
example, I went to a routine eye exam. My optometrist thought she saw something
funny, and sent me on to a retinologist colleague of hers. Before I knew it, I
was diagnosed with lattice degeneration and that very day they scooped my eye
against the side of my head and lasered it. While that might sound
traumatic—and it did feel a little like that one scene in “Clockwork Orange”—
it sure beat going blind for no good reason!
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