Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Being Sick in Grad School

When you're under the age of 18, being really sick sucks, but having a cold that's just bad enough to keep you home from school can be somewhat magical.  Elementary school, and even middle and high school move so slowly, relatively, that one can afford to miss one to three days.  And those days can be filled with soup, saltines, Jello, 7Up, and Judging Amy.  Or at least that's what my sick days used to be like.

College sick days are not quite as much fun.  Class now meets usually only twice a week, so missing one day of it is tough, and more than one day can be deadly.  You can still indulge in Jello and syndicated television, but there's no Mom to stop in periodically to feel your forehead or make you tea.  But, for the most part, there are friends who live down the hall or down the block who will bring you class notes and trashy magazines and, if you're lucky like I was, Mom lives 2 miles away and can stop by with some Magical Mom Healing Powers (tm).

Being sick in grad school, as I'm finding out this week, is the worst of the worst.  Forget college, when classes met twice a week.  Now classes only meet once a week!  Missed today's class?  Oh, well, you just missed the only discussion on that text you wanted to write about, and you missed 10% of the class this quarter.  My head cold has oh-so-conveniently timed itself to match perfectly (note that I am dripping not only with snot [sorry for the image] but also with sarcasm) with my overload of Presentation One tomorrow, and Presentation Two on Monday.  Not exactly the time to coddle yourself with saltines and 7Up.  I suppose taking care of yourself when you're sick is just one more of those responsibilities that come with growing up, along with privileges like going to fricking grad school, which is so infinitely more interesting than elementary school...but right now some time to take a few days off, along with some Jello and Magical Mom Healing Powers (tm) would definitely not be unappreciated.

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