All college students miss the comforts of home, but one luxury that many overlook is having someone to take care of you when you get sick. Whether it is a head cold, an ear infection, or the flu-- being sick in college is infinitely more miserable than getting sick at home, and here’s why (coming from the girl who just spent the last three days in bed with a stomach bug).
1. There is no one to take care of you.
Maybe you are lucky and have an amazingly caring and nurturing roommate (on the premed track) like mine, but chances are your roommate just isn’t quite as willing to deal with your bodily fluids as your mom was.
2. You do not own a box of tissues.
Tissues are one of those things that college students do not think to buy at the grocery store until it is too late, or, maybe you just didn’t think tissues were worth spending your precious few dollars on--until it is too late. Now you are just blowing your nose on your bed sheets, which means you will have to pay for laundry.
3. You don’t own any cough medicine or fever reducers, either.
Come on now guys, I know it is not fun to spend money on over the counter drugs (you’d much rather pop for illicit ones), but it’s a good investment. When the flu comes around you’ll be glad you sprung for that DayQuil. Laying in bed all congested with a fever is just miserable.
4. You don’t have any way to contain vomit.
You went the grocery store last week, but you didn’t think to save the plastic bags, or, if your town is like mine, all the stores use paper bags instead. Your trash can is one of those silly little wire waste paper bins meant for an office, and that’s not going to hold anything if worse comes to worse. You could go sit on the bathroom floor in front of a toilet, but who knows the last time the bathroom has been cleaned? It smells like it’s been a while.
5. Health services is a half mile away.
You can barely get out of bed to walk to the bathroom, let alone up and down multiple flights of stairs and a few blocks across campus. Maybe if you stagger around enough Public Safety will pick you up thinking you’re drunk and disorderly at 2:00 in the afternoon and take you there themselves, but if you’re like me, it’s much more likely that you’ll just fall in the stairwell and won’t be able to get up.
6. It’s impossible to get an appointment at health services anyway.
If your college is like mine, then your health services is probably understaffed and ill-equipped to deal with any but the most minor of illnesses. The only appointment slot they have open is during the class you have to take a test in. Choices, choices.
7. There is no such thing as make up work.
When you were sick in high school, you could just stay home and you’d get an extension for any assignments you missed. Now in college, there is no such thing as a sick day. If there is a test in bio, you had better drag yourself out of bed and get there, because that test is a third of your entire grade and there are no make up dates. That paper isn’t going to wait, either.
8. You have nothing to eat.
You ate the last can of chicken noodle soup the first day you were sick, and now there is nothing in your cabinet. You could try to get yourself out of bed and across campus to the dining hall, but everything is cooked in so much oil that it would probably do more harm than good. The pot that was labelled “chicken noodle soup” contains some mysterious green goop that is definitely not what it says it is.
9. Your bed is too high to get into without help.
When you live in a 10 by 12 room with another person, lofting your bed just makes good, space saving sense. Now you have the flu and the antibiotics you’re on make you dizzy, and you’re weak from dehydration. The sweet comfort of bed is five feet away and your head is spinning. Maybe your roommate spotted you as you got into bed, but you had better hope that you don’t need to get up to go to the bathroom in the night.
