Being ill at uni is by no means uncommon; the convergence of a huge number of people carrying every disease under the sun is perfect for cultivating a battery of flus, coughs and colds, one or more of which will be allocated to you.
This, alongside a lifestyle characterised by excessive drinking, dirty living environments, stress, strange sleeping patterns and sharing drinks and cigarettes makes not becoming ill something of a task. You might even be one of those lucky people who has the ability to maintain some level of persistent illness throughout the whole year – the blocked nose that will probably never, ever go away or the jarring cough that makes everyone in the lecture hall want to dash their bag at your face.
Nonetheless, nobody will deny that being sick away from home is uniquely dreadful. You spend the onset of your illness wishing you had called it a night at 3, rather than 9am last Saturday, scrutinising over whose cup you drank from, listening to the nuances of your housemates’ sniffles and coughs to identify your infector. Everybody is a suspect. The air feels heavy and suddenly, nowhere is clean. You can feel every bit of carcinogen landing inside you as you walk past the library’s smoking area and you rely on abrasive toilet roll which completely removes the top few layers of skin from your nose because you refused to pay £2 for proper tissues. Slowly, but surely, your body gives up on itself and you finally succumb to illness.
Here’s our guide to pulling through:
Cut yourself some slack. Accept that you’re unwell and the next few days are a write-off, and commit to getting better.
You already had a thousand things to do, and the metaphorical pile of new tasks continues to grow menacingly in the corner of your mind. It's important to accept now that you would probably have put them off anyway, so they can wait a little longer while you recover.
Get proper sleep.
The worst thing is that when you’re really, properly ill, sleep provides little real comfort. You spend days in a state of half-consciousness, falling in and out of the hellish realm of pseudo-sleep. You have strange dreams, and you don’t really know what’s going on, and even the sound of the TV in the background becomes tiresome and grating. Tell your housemates to shut up for a few hours, grab some water and get settled in for a siesta; you'll feel a lot better.
Don’t drink or smoke.
Obviously.
It's worth spending money on medicine and nice tissues.
Being ill is shit, but, amazingly, Kleenex and Johnson's and Nurofen have invested quite a bit in trying to make it easier. Buy proper tissues and don't just steal loo roll from uni. Buy throat syrup that doesn't taste like urine. Buy medicine with 'fast action' written on the side of it; it probably makes no difference, but the placebo effect will lift you over the hump. It's little things like these that add up to make everything more bearable.
People will believe you’re ill. You don’t need to be so dramatic.
Every two clauses that come out of your mouth become punctuated by “I am so ill”, with a selection of moans and groans and sniffles to make sure everyone knows that you are, “so ill”. You feel this nagging sense that nobody believes that you really are sick. I promise that your friends will notice that you really aren’t yourself and will do their part in nursing you back to health. Additionally, you don’t need to go to such great lengths in your emails to your lecturers and seminar leaders to ensure them that you REALLY aren’t skiving off and you feel GENUINELY TERRIBLE that you are missing their sessions – people do get ill and they don’t care that much anyway, as long as you have notified them of your absence. If you’re worried, get a doctor’s note to grant you with some legitimacy.
Stay in for a weekend.
There’s a reason your mum didn’t let you go to town with your friends the day after you missed school – and it’s not because she was an evil bitch who didn’t want you to have fun. It was because you need to be careful when your immune system is still vulnerable. Even if you start to feel better, it’s worth taking a weekend off or you’ll probably just remain in that shitty state of limbo between sickness and health. There are fifty-two weekends in a year. It is not the end of the world if you miss one night out.
Know that you will bounce back.
You look at yourself in the mirror after five days of abandoning your skincare regime, neglecting your eyebrows and subsisting on a diet of tea and paracetamol. The worn, mono-browed face of a husk of a human looks back at you, eliciting the humbling, albeit depressing, realisation that you are just not as fit as you once thought. You’ve spent days on your own and have become unsure as to whether you’ll ever experience joy again. You’ve probably cried a fair bit. The sight of yourself makes you want to cry some more. You’ll be okay. Look at some pictures of yourself from last weekend and remember that you’ll look like that again soon.
Cover image: @tommygunns_design
