University is kind of like living in a petri dish. The cacophony of coughs and sneezes in lecture theatres and the piles of unwashed dishes in the communal kitchen sink pretty much guarantee that if one person is ill, everyone is going to get ill, and learning to deal with a nasty bout of the common cold when you live away from home and your parents is anything but easy.
It usually begins with the timeless question of “Am I hungover or is there something actually wrong with me?”
Even if you haven’t drunk any alcohol in over a week, there’s still a tiny part of you that clings to the possibility that your pounding headache and general grossness is going to disappear by the evening.
But eventually, you have to face the facts.
You’re 24 hours in, you’ve forgotten what it’s like to breathe through your nose, and you have to admit, reluctantly, that this is no alcohol induced illness. This is a cold.
Next, you will experience the dawning realisation that you’re fatally underprepared for illness.
Why didn’t you think to buy cough medicine and decongestant tablets and eighteen boxes of tissues at the start of term?!
You’re forced to leave your bed to gather supplies, and it’s potentially the worst thing ever.
You make the pilgrimage to the pharmacy, wearing pretty much just your pyjamas with a coat over the top. It’s the most painful walk of your life, and when you finally get back home, laden with painkillers, you vow to never leave your bed. Ever. Again.
Stage Five: Panic
You’re in so much pain that you’re sure that this has to be something worse than simply the common cold, so you head over to WebMD, and suddenly you’re halfway to convincing yourself you have lung cancer. Self-diagnosis is a dangerous trap, friends. Get out of that rabbit hole, switch off the computer and get some sleep.
You’re suddenly incapable of feeding yourself.
Gone are the days when your mum would make you any food you wanted and let you eat it in bed. If you want to eat, you need to cook, and cooking while ill is sort of like physical torture. Made all the worse by the steadily emptying fridge and the knowledge that you’re way too ill to make it to ASDA.
The constant coughing and sneezing is incredibly impractical in public situations.
You eventually make it to a lecture, but you’re mortified by the amount of times you need to cough/sneeze while the lecturer is speaking, and so you try to suppress it. Bad idea. The choking, spluttering sound you make instead draws far more attention to you, and also makes the vast majority of the student body hate your guts for a) disrupting the lecture, and b) infecting the rest of them with what sounds like the bubonic plague.
You’ve infected every single person you know.
The end is in sight! You start feeling better, the world seems less horrible, and you’re able to function like a regular human being again. And then, you start noticing your housemates coming down with the exact same cold. One by one, they drop like flies, and the guilt is almost as bad as the inflamed sinuses.
Curse you, cold.