You’re a few weeks into the school year. Everything seems to be going well: you and your roommate are getting along, you haven’t failed any classes yet, you’ve only had three existential crises, and you’ve only called your mother about 50 times. However, every college student knows that this period of health and happiness won’t last. As sure as the sun rises, the plague comes like clockwork, and no one is safe.

Thanks to the changing of the seasons and the massive incubator that is a college dormitory, once one person succumbs to illness, no one is safe.

Sooner or later, you walk into your room after a long week of school and ask your roommate if she wants to go out and celebrate the “freakin’ weekend.” She turns around and with an expression of utter defeat announces:

And you respond:

She spends the rest of the night switching between terrifying coughing fits and uncontrollable sniffling, and all you want to do is scream:

You spend the next several days compulsively washing your hands, sanitizing your room and carrying around several mini bottles of Germ-X.

But despite your best efforts, you begin to feel the shadow of sickness creeping up on you. Symptoms begin popping up and it feels like the plague is lurking behind you, waiting for the best time to attack.

This goes on for a day or two, until one morning you wake up a shivering, feverish, nauseous, stuffy, sleepy mess.

But you have your first midterm next week, so you pop some DayQuil and force yourself to go to class. You refuse to be taken down by a mere cold.

However, the DayQuil starts making you feel a little loopy, so you spend the majority of your day like this:

Which is nothing compared to how you’ll feel on NyQuil later:

And don’t get me started on TheraFlu:

It seems to take four times the usual effort to make it through the day.

You’ve resorted to begging your roommate to put you out of your misery.

But to your immense surprise, you don’t actually die!

You fought against the plague and won. Nothing can stop you now.