By the time the hot water hit my feverish head, I realized I wasn’t hungover on a Tuesday morning. The headache hadn’t passed, my skin was oddly numb despite our enthusiastic water heater, and my body felt like a piñata salvaged from an eight-year-old’s birthday party.
Getting sick during the school year is a higher state of being. I took a breath too close to a diseased person and unknowingly punched my ticket for a week-long vacation. There is no better feeling than feverishly sending out distress beacons to all your professors, “I am coming down with the flu and won’t be in class this week.”
This WEEK.
None of this “taking the day off” nonsense – I’m holed up in my bedroom with three frozen pizzas and a Netflix subscription. I may wake each morning feeling like a small gang of freshmen beat me in my sleep, but I’m watching Kill Bill while you’re taking notes for the exam we both have next week. While you try to find a seat at lunch during the noon rush, I’m selectively eating a single cold pepperoni before I put the rest of the pizza in the oven. Bon Appetit.
Try the flu. Just once. Sure, there are night sweats and fever dreams. There’s even a possibility that you end up with a life-threatening respiratory illness. There’s also a chance you land yourself a pass to ignore the outside world long enough that you get a hero’s welcome when you return. Until then, you’re off the grid. You don’t exist.
Still, there must be a better way to take on the flu. Why does every drug have conflicting dosage times and limits? The DayQuil label says “take one dose every four hours” but then further down the label it screams “DO NOT TAKE MORE THAN FOUR DOSES IN 24 HOURS.” That means the fun only lasts 16 hours. What am I supposed to do with the other eight?
If your body is not like mine and metabolizes painkillers at a reasonable rate, you can schedule out your day around ibuprofen and Nyquil. Otherwise you find yourself shivering inside, waiting for your next fix, trying to contribute to a group project over email while your body commits a crusade against all things comfortable.
And when your symptoms get too bad, there’s always WebMD to tell you it’s probably cancer but that’s just its opinion.
Sure, I was miserable. It became very apparent why modern heating and plumbing is just one of the little barriers keeping us from dying of a common cold or worse.
The flu comes aggressively, and without warning, like a small child begging its mother for candy in the checkout lane. The worst is when one reaches the eye of the storm and the fever vanishes for a day. You catch yourself trying on regular clothes, maybe cleaning a dish or two, before your body tunes in to “Flu 2: Back with a Vengeance.”
The residual effects might be a deterrent for some. Coughing up mucus during a friend’s birthday party is certainly not the gift he wanted but probably the one he deserved. Deciding which clothes to burn and which to launder can be unnerving. For the next week expect everyone to shout “Unclean!” and then smile and apologize but also back away a few inches more.
The flu was a painful, awful experience, but I’m a month into my semester and I’ve already had a week break. Can you say the same?
Joe Pappalardo is a senior studying marketing.
