When I was in elementary school and I stayed home sick, the world seemed to stop. This wasn’t a frequent occurrence, for the anxiety of missing work often outweighed the discomfort of a sore throat. Looking back, I was insane. The work I was missing was a set of 12 subtraction problems, but no one personified the phrase “academic weapon” like 10-year-old me. I was lethal.
Despite my best efforts, however, there were a few times I had to resign myself to the brown leather couch in my living room where my best friend was a coffee table adorned with a tissue box bigger than my head, a green mixing bowl for the dirty tissues, a beige mug of tea and a regularly-disinfected remote. My mom would call off of work and between conference calls and naps, we would watch comedies or Disney princess movies until it was time for a soup dinner and an early sleep. I was incredibly lucky that my mom had the freedom to take care of me— that on those days, beyond my own anxiety about my 12 subtraction problems, all I had to worry about was feeling better.
As I went through high school during a pandemic, my anxieties surrounding illness did not improve much. The combination of my irrational fear of missing school for one day and falling irreparably behind, and my fun-loving-dramatic-doom-and-gloom nature, left me terrified of being sick.
Post-COVID, I think it became very easy to adopt the mindset that a tickle can become two-week quarantine or worse in a second. I’m lucky to say that I am not immunocompromised or at any particular risk when I am sick, but I believe I’ve reached the level of paranoia where if someone coughs within a three-mile radius, I’m convinced that the end is near.
And so two weeks ago, when everyone at Allegheny started hacking up their lungs and getting fevers that broke 100 degrees fahrenheit, I was in a panic. The night I started noticing the illness around me, I drank a copious amount of EmergenC and Liquid IV, took Ibuprofen, Allegra and a cocktail of vitamins, and drank a full Hydro Flask of water before I went to sleep. Within 48 hours, I had a sniffle. Within 60 hours, I had a headache. And within 72 hours, I had a fever, chills, full body aches, an absolutely sinister cough. I considered drafting a will.
Granted, I am a drama queen, I am anxious, and just like anyone, I hate inconveniences. But we get over it.
College campuses are petri dishes. There is no way around it. People get sick. I was sick, and of course, I knew that this too would pass and that I would get better. On that Super Bowl Sunday, however, as I wrote out-sick emails to my professors and peers, I started to cry.
But why?
I thought of my mom and my table-best-friend and the tissue box and COVID and being quarantined in my childhood bedroom away from my family during the winter months of 2020 and it hit me; I wasn’t afraid of being sick. I was afraid of being alone.
This was the first time I’d been truly sick away from home. My mom wasn’t going to walk in the front door with a bowl of soup or a hug. I was an adult, a sick adult whose missed work and missed meetings could never be recovered, and all I could do was sit in my dorm in Baldwin Hall and send a few emails.
I was not in control. I was sick. I was alone. It sucked.
I also think I was having a fever nightmare that somehow made me believe that because of the one day I had missed, I was going to fail at college and never feel better again. A common side effect of the 2024 Allegheny College Plague: utter despair.
I laid in bed coughing, crying, snotting, sleeping and pondering ‘Why is my head hurting so bad? What am I missing in class? Why couldn’t I fight this off? This is definitely what being hit by a truck feels like’ — the typical dramatics.
And then I heard a knock at my door. I buckled myself disembarking my ridiculously high-lofted bed and I looked through my peephole. It was my friend holding a Limon and Chile bowl with grilled chicken from Burgers and Fries because I prefer that to the Limon Chile chicken. In other words, it was an angel who knew what chicken I liked and brought me dinner.
As I devoured my bowl of protein, fiber and carbohydrates that would carry me on my healing journey, I tasted an ingredient that I didn’t know I desperately needed: love.
One by one, responses to my out-sick emails rolled in with messages of concern, well wishes and offers of help. Having just joined a sorority, this support was even more amplified. I had a family at school.
The love and chicken ignited an epiphany within my pounding head; I am not alone. I am just sick and in college. And life goes on.
Disclaimer Two: I’m aware that my dramatization and romanticization of common illness stems from an anxious mindset and may seem a bit superfluous, but as an op-ed writer and a drama queen at heart, I have to put into practice my belief that small things can teach us big, beautiful lessons.
I stayed “home” sick, but my world didn’t stop. The world’s attitude toward sickness has changed a lot since I was 10. As has mine. But despite all the fear and panic that comes with that change, I think there is a positive there. I think we take better care of each other.
And now that I’m better, not having a fever nightmare, and much less emotional, I still get teary-eyed writing this. Because here we are at college, legal adults, scared most of the time, anxious most of the time, sick most of the time, but we are not alone.
We have love and chicken.