and cajolers

Honoring the decision-makers, caregivers and cajolers

David Tyler

I’m that kind of guy. You know the kind. In fact, you may very well be living with one. Perhaps your husband, or son, or father? The kind who will lean on any excuse in the world not to get that checkup. The kind who will wait until some discomfort is unbearable before visiting a doctor. The kind who will remain cool, calm and collected in the face of all kinds of pressure, but will get the flop sweats in the presence of someone in a white lab coat.

Yeah, that kind of guy.

When I was a couple years out of college, just learning how to be an adult, my mother asked how long it had been since I had visited a dentist. It had been few years. It wasn’t high up on my early twenties’ priorities. So, after a couple months of gentle cajoling, she took matters into her own hands and scheduled an appointment for me with her dentist. I dutifully went, got the ivories polished and x-rays taken and the dentist scheduled a follow up appointment for a couple weeks later. So, again, I took the time off work, went to the appointment and met with the dentist, who told me there was nothing wrong with my teeth. It’s probably standard procedure for a dentist to make a follow up appointment following a first-time visit, but taking the time off work and having to pay for a follow-up consult that I felt could easily have been done over the phone rankled me so much that I simply never went back to the dentist. For years. Decades. When my mother would ask, I would just say I don’t have time and there’s nothing wrong with my teeth.

Until there was.

More than two decades later, I started to feel some pain and sensitivity to cold in certain parts of my mouth. At a party, I chatted with a friend who is a dentist and told him I needed to pay him a visit. When I told him it had been at least 20 years since my last dentist appointment, he certainly wasn’t shocked. He had heard it all before. There’s lots of us guys out there.

This time around, I was lucky to get away with two visits. There was a lot of chiseling and drilling and filling to reverse two decades of neglect. At some point during a particularly fun procedure called a debridement, I thought, ‘I should have listened to my mother.’

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, women make 80 percent of the healthcare decisions in families. And for families that have a member with extraordinary care needs, that responsibility usually falls unequally on women.

June is Men’s Health Awareness Month, and in this edition we focus on Central New York women who, in addition to their many other roles, take the lead in the care of their loved ones. With the help of our friends at Crouse Health, we also offer a brief primer on what men should be doing at various stages of their life to ensure their health. Just in case you have a guy like me in your family.

CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION: In the story Fighting Cystic Fibrosis... in the May edition of Syracuse Woman Magazine, the definition of Cystic Fibrosis was unclear. Cystic Fibrosis is a genetic disease that causes the body to produce thick sticky mucus in the lungs and digestive system. In the lungs, it traps bacteria which causes inflammation and lung infections, which over time decrease lung function. In the digestive system, the mucus blocks digestive enzymes from being secreted from the pancreas.We also wrote: “With the passage of the decades, more and more people with cystic fibrosis are living into their 50s, 60s and beyond.” That should have read "into their 30s, 40s and beyond."

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Cover photo by Alice G. Patterson

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