With the seasons changing and fall turning into winter, sniffles and runny noses become rampant as college students start feeling the toll of midterms and those late night studying sessions. The close quarters of freshmen dorms create the perfect environment for any strain to take hold and spread, especially with the weakened immune systems of transitioning freshmen discovering their new sleep schedules and diets.
At home, I had a cabinet full of various medicines and drugs to soothe any pain, itch or feeling of queasiness in my reserves, ready to put me back in optimal health within days. As I carefully stored photos of my friends into folders that would soon go up on my new college wall, medicine was not the first thing I thought of packing; instead, it was an oh yeah afterthought that my parents had to remind me of.
However, I soon realized I would not have the same luxuries I had at home, when my suitemates started to have their own brushes with college sickness. Suddenly, the suite turns into an impromptu hospital in which everyone pools their medicine in an attempt to offer help in any way possible. It’s a unique dynamic of different people with different resources coming together to support their own. Alone, we may not have enough to ward off the common cold, but together, we have enough drugs to fend off any plague that threatens us. I’m pretty sure I’ve offered Vitamin C tablets to anyone in my suite who has shown any sign of distress.
When something that cannot be solved with drugs presents itself, we all pitch in our own medicinal knowledge to the best of our ability. We swiftly turn into private doctors, offering whatever knowledge or past experience we had. A diagnosing discussion begins and our patient is barraged by an onslaught of questions and potential solutions. However, we do know when rest is needed and we retreat to our daily lives, though ready to help at a moment’s notice.
It may just be my suite dynamic, but living together offers a kind of closeness hard to find in our normal lives. When a sniffle and cough rolls around, it gets hard to move, and suddenly hugs are extremely off limits. Curing a suitemate’s sickness is beneficial to us all—after all, we live together.