When I was first struck down with illness during week six of my freshman fall, I honestly felt a little bit of joy. According to Dick’s House, I had a nebulous ailment — either the flu, cold or some unknown virus. I felt like a pile of bricks, but it forced me to take a break from my grueling schedule of: class, activity, meal, exercise, rinse and repeat.
Those reading this article who have attended this college for even a term understand the burnout one can experience in the space of 10 weeks. Without the forced break my sickness imposed on me, it would have been difficult to make space for myself.
In a normal term, it’s important to allot time in a day to rest — but for me, that “rest time” had been reduced to normal sleeping hours. Then, slowly but surely, sleep slipped down my list of priorities. I thought nothing of spending an extra hour in the library on a Tuesday or out at a fraternity on a Wednesday — after all, I didn’t want to miss out on any potential opportunities to make a new friend. It doesn’t take a genius to put together the origins of my illness. In my opinion, college kids are slightly cleaner than toddlers but a little grosser in their habits than middle schoolers. My weakened immune system and sleep-deprived body never stood a chance.
So I lay in my bed, binged a mediocre television show, threw my hand over my forehead and declared to my roommate, “I want to be left alone!” I took DayQuil by day, NyQuil at night and drank Gatorade at all hours. Though I lived in Judge Hall — a harrowing 15-minute trek from the main buildings on campus — my new friends took pity on me and brought me soup.
The illnesses I have experienced at Dartmouth are ultimately mild, and I eventually recover. But, at a certain point in time, being sick becomes quite unpleasant. This is approximately the same amount of time it takes you to realize you would not like the television show you’re watching if you did not have brain fog. Day three of a fever starts to feel stuffy and suffocating when you live in a shoebox dorm room in a building that should probably have been torn down in the 1990s. That three-day rule flies out the window with all illnesses that involve vomiting, which are horrible from the start — including the mysterious maple salmon-related food poisoning that ravaged my freshman floor on a Friday night. While at first illness is a forced break, it quickly progresses into what I have coined the “This Sucks” stage.
Once the “This Sucks” stage commences, and you’ve blown through five boxes of Kleenex, the pressure of returning to normalcy begins to mount. That pesky D-Plan leaves very little room for error, and a week taken off of classes means playing catch-up for the rest of the term.
I often use the phrase, “Four years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined I’d be here now.” Usually, I’m referring to an accomplishment like standing at the finish line of the Fifty or in front of my sorority for our Wednesday night meetings. The sentiment is not so joyful when I say four years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined I’d be getting sick for the 11th term of my Dartmouth career. Oh yes, I even got sick for a few days of sophomore summer — and don’t you dare begin to claim you didn’t. What about this college causes terms to be characterized by waves of infections? Is it our own hygiene habits? Or something more insidious?
When my now-graduated friends from home text me, “Ellie, you’re literally always sick,” I tend to dismiss their concerns because it feels like everyone gets sick all the time here at Dartmouth. But I am literally always sick — or at least once a term — which means that I have been sick at least three times a year for the past four years, with the exception of sophomore year, when I was here for four terms, and thus sick four times.
This experience was completely novel to me during my freshman fall. With each impending term, I began to expect illness — I anticipated the exhaustion, strange rattling coughs and (always latent) congestion that would surely befall me. But for approximately 12 years of my illustrious academic career before that, I rarely fell ill despite exposure to whatever vile playgrounds or 80-year-old gum-riddled high school desks I faced. I had what I thought was a pretty strong immune system, and although I was never well-rested, the temperature of my hometown in Florida never really dips below 50 degrees even in the dead of winter. So where do the origins of my collegiate indispositions lie? It’s probably somewhere in the flurry of over-caffeination, shared beverages and a general frailty when faced with the cold.
This winter, I honestly believed I would make it across the week 5 threshold without falling ill. I take vitamins, exercise regularly and have taken pride in sleeping not seven, not eight, but at least nine hours on any given night to defend against some looming ailment. But a freezing cold day backcountry skiing Mount Cardigan coupled with the four hours of sleep I got after the snowball fight resulted in another flu. I don’t even bother making the trek across campus to Dick’s House for another recommendation to “try some Sudafed.” I just try my best to sleep. Surprisingly, 13 hours of sleep and one entire season of “Severance” can actually work wonders to combat a 102-degree fever.
As much as I once scapegoated the “alleged” mold infestation of my freshman-year dorm room, I no longer have anything to blame but my own habits. No, I wouldn’t trade late nights chatting with friends or early-morning hikes for the world, but I would prefer to be healthy. There’s no fairytale ending here because I anticipate sickness next term. Perhaps I’ll even fall ill again this term, despite my constant striving toward good health. Then, I’ll graduate and the rest of you suckers will have to stick out whichever rhinovirus mutation originated in my body, years later. Finally, a legacy true to my Dartmouth experience.
