When grown men cry

Johnny paced restlessly around his hospital bed. He’s a regular here at our liver transplant ward. This morning was supposed to be pretty routine: address any urgent issues that came up overnight, draw morning bloods before medications, and follow up on pending requests and results. A month into working here as an intern doctor, I moved through these motions with practiced efficiency. What I wasn’t prepared for was that two blood draws would stay with me long after my shift ended, prompting me to rethink the quiet ways our cultural expectations on masculinity shapes how my patients experience their illnesses.

“I’m Dr Chung”, I said to Johnny, kidney dish ready in hand. Inside it lay a needle with a pink-capped tube. I delivered a line I had practiced dozens of times, “I’m here to take your blood so we can find you a pack of donated blood for your anemia”. His anemia was something simple, easy to fix compared to the many complex medical issues we see here. Johnny stopped pacing and lowered himself onto the bed with a sigh, extending his arm.

As I wrapped the bright orange tourniquet around his biceps, he uttered, “I don’t want to stay in the hospital”. “My wife’s angry with me for coming in all the time”. A vein. I felt its familiar bounce and wiped it swiftly with alcohol. "I never tell her how bad it feels. I don’t want to be here either”.

I looked up. His head hung low, brows knitted together as he lamented his deteriorating health and crumbling relationship. Most of my patients here are older Asian men who care little for small talk. Perhaps it’s cultural, an Asian way of respecting the other’s space and quiet. Perhaps it’s systemic, an understanding of how perpetually understaffed our public hospital system is, making brisk interactions between healthcare workers and doctors the norm. It’s a shame, really. We gain a necessary efficiency, but lose on connection and rapport. Point is, my mornings usually pass in brisk greetings and efficient check-box ticking. Not this one. Here was a man in his 60s offering me a glimpse into his softness and the vulnerabilities of his sufferings.

“I’m sure she cares for you deeply” I said gently, as the tube started filling up with blood. “She’s probably upset because she worries for you. No one likes being in the hospital”. Johnny gazed into the distance, tears glistening on the surface of his eyes. “I could never tell her how I feel”, he whispered. “She cannot know. She mustn’t know how difficult the past few years have been for me. My health keeps getting worse. It feels horrid. But I just can’t let her know”.

His words hung in the air, raw and tender. Vulnerabilities that can only be revealed to a stranger, never to the person he loved the most. A veil of strength meant to shield her from a shattering truth: that even he, the man of the household, sworn to provide and protect, was not immune to the maladies that will one day consume us all - death - and all the fear that comes with it.

Part of me wish I had stayed longer, encourged him to give her a chance to truly understand and be there alongside him. In truth, I was merely a listener. I hope our brief encounter had lightened a burden he’d been carrying. But I wonder: what would it take for our society to allow grown men to feel safe enough to cry and admit to their fears, pain, and vulnerabilities? I for one, believe that such honesty is not a threat to love. Quite the opposite. I believe it is what sustains it.

That same evening on call, I met Frank. A young man with a rare disease causing a bleed in his brain. He had just come out of a brain surgery to remove a part of his skull to relieve pressure on his brain. His head was wrapped in a white mesh netting, his body limp beneath brown blankets. He couldn’t speak. The ICU was filled with beeping machines, colorful monitors beside every bed, yet, it is the place where life felt the most colorless. People often appeared unrecognizable, from surgery or illness, distorted by scars, staples, tubes down their throats, swelling, exhaustion, or the gravity of what they had survived. My job again, was to draw blood.

Fasting and blood loss during surgery make veins difficult to find. With Frank, my first attempt failed. The second succeeded. As always, I apologized for causing him to through the pain of a second needlestick. Maybe it was the culmination of everything: the pain, the exhaustion, the crash after the adrenaline of a major surgery. Maybe it was simply that second needlestick, but my words seemed to touch something in this young man, and tears rolled down his temples.

I placed one hand on his shoulder and whispered, “I know it’s been a hard time. I’m sorry”. I stood there for a moment in the silence, a quiet acknowledgement of the suffering and weight he had been carrying. When his tears dried, he closed his eyes to rest.

These stories may seem insignificant compared to the screams and wails that echo through hospital halls. But it is in these small moments that I witness a tenderness that exists within every living being. I see in Johnny and Frank what I see in all of us, myself included: A longing for our pain and experiences to be seen and understood; and a need for a space to release emotions that have been held captive behind a fascade for too long.

Perhaps I experience this uniquely as a zillenial doctor working in a time where conversations about mental health, gender norms, and emotional expression are evolving. It is a privilege to stand at the intersection of culture and medicine, and to share these reflections. When illness strips away the fabrics of reality as we know it, and the roles and identities that we anchor ourselves to (provider, protector, leader, independent), everybody deserves to have someone by their side who can hold space for their fear, validate their pain, and be a shoulder to cry on.