Chapter Twenty-Five: In Sickness and In Semi-Health (~jinghan)

“I was sick over the weekend, had that scratchy feeling in the back of my throat. You know? But it’s better now.”

As my boyfriend was telling me this, I suddenly noticed a scratchy feeling in the back of my throat. I chose to ignore it, except to drink some tea in the hope that the feeling would pass. I could not afford to get sick! Sure, it was only the second week of uni, but already the physics lecturer had chewed through two and a half chapters of the text book (and by no means small petty chapters like the ones from last semester explaining how to round off numbers) and the maths teacher had told us that we would be “utterly destroyed” if we did not study for three consecutive days. Already there were lecture notes that I needed to, but hadn’t looked over, tutorial sheets that I hadn’t attempted, chapters I hadn’t read, readings I hadn’t printed out… I could not afford to be sick!

By the evening my throat was dying a small but dramatic death, and the outlook was bleak.

I did not like the idea of taking a day off uni. For one, I had only missed lectures because of timetable clashes, and the idea of all the effort of chasing up all the information or, heaven-forbid, not getting around to looking at the information at all was just too scary. And secondly, I had a physics lab which I didn’t have any free spaces in which to do a makeup, as horrible as spending three hours in a laboratory seems to a sick student.

And so I went to uni on Wednesday. And it was not a nice experience.

The next day had more lectures, and even one that finished at six-fifteen. I was contemplating the horribleness of this prospect when my father suggested, “maybe you should take a day off tomorrow.”

I don’t know what I was thinking the first night, but suddenly it seemed that simple. I would take a day off. I would spend it sleeping, and catching up on all the work that was weighing me down and amplifying my stress-levels, and I would get up the next day and everything would be calm and well. I sent a text to a couple of friends telling them to collect handouts and notify me of important announcements. And then I sat there staring at my phone… was that all I needed to do in order to plan a day at home? How ridiculously simple!

And so I spend the day alternating between sleep and study. One activity relieved the boredom and the other relieved the exhaustion caused by an active immune system. I even found time to clean my room, which made me feel much more in control of my life.

In retrospect, getting sick was almost a blessing in disguise. I mean, if I was going to run myself into the ground in week two, how did I plan to survive the whole semester?! Now if only that horrible sniffly-ness you get left with for months after being sick would go away now…