A student isolated on Danielsen Hall’s second floor during his flu-like illness said Boston University’s flu management strategy left him largely cut off from flu necessities.
College of Engineering sophomore Ian Koenigsknecht, who lives in Myles Standish Hall, was isolated in Danielsen from Monday until Friday morning of last week. He said if his mother Lynne Koenigsknecht had not paid to ship him supplies from North Carolina, he would have been without food or fluids during the duration of his stay besides one meal delivered Tuesday by the hall director of Myles.
‘They did say that they were supposed to be bringing fluids to me,’ Koenigsknecht said.’ ‘I had a little bit of drink in my room but that only lasted the night.’
He said he was told to find a friend who could bring him food via ‘Rhetty-to-Go meals’ and other supplies throughout the week. But Danielsen’s distance from BU’s main campus and his friends’ conflicting schedules made it difficult for them to get to him, he said.
With Koenigsknecht having little to no access to food, Koenigsknecht’s mother Lynne said she paid $153 for overnight shipping to Boston from her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. to get $90 worth of food delivered to her son.
Having to finding a designated person to bring meals was unreasonable, Lynne said.
‘He said, ‘They want my friends to bring me food.’ I said that’s crazy,’ Lynne said. ‘He was never assigned . . . a flu buddy.’
BU spokesman Colin Riley said the flu buddy system is situational.
‘It really depends. We’re looking for flu buddies,’ Riley said. ‘We try to appropriately handle each case.’
Riley said resident assistants have a checklist to give to ill students in these situations.
‘There is a practice. There’s a checklist. This is not rocket science, this is not anything secret,’ he said. ‘We want to make sure people who are ill are taken care of and people who are well are taken care of.’
Riley said students are given a flu kit of masks, wipes and a thermometer. The checklist includes guidelines for not attending class, wearing a mask to go to a common bathroom, getting in contact with a flu buddy and arranging for ‘flu meals’ at the Rhetty-to-Go website.
‘Contact your ‘flu buddy,” the checklist says. ‘Your flu buddy should be another resident student who’ll check in on you, assist you with getting food and fluids, and help care for you until your illness runs its course. If you need assistance identifying a flu buddy, please contact your RA or local Residence Life professional.’
Riley said BU’s goal is better communication.
‘When someone doesn’t feel they were handled best, I imagine it is not a comforting experience,’ Riley said. ‘Let’s hope that doesn’t happen again to anybody else.’
He said the most important thing is personal responsibility.
‘What works well in the community is awareness, self-understanding, adult responsibility of being able to take the appropriate steps,’ Riley said. ‘[Students are] young adults, but they’re adults.’
Koenigsknecht said he did not receive the flu checklist until after arriving at Danielsen, about an hour after returning from Student Health Services. He did not know what to take with him when leaving Myles, and ended up carrying his own belongings from Myles to Danielsen ‘- all while running a high fever.
‘The only thing he had to drink was a small box of Capri Suns. I said take them,’ Lynne said. ‘When he got there the room was bare. No bedding, no fridge. Bathroom in the hallway.’
She said he was missing several important items.
‘He didn’t have a towel, he didn’t have anything to throw up in,’ she said. ‘He took his temperature. It was almost 104. He said, ‘I don’t have a cup, I don’t have anything to drink.’ He went to the bathroom, he used his hands as a cup to drink.’
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said in a phone conference with The Daily Free Press that isolation is one of the most important campus strategies.
‘Most importantly in college kids . . . is to separate kids, as they get sick, from other students,’ Sebelius said. ‘Moving roommates who are sick out of dorms, . . . having some kind of meal brigade to make sure students with the flu don’t have to go to the cafeteria to get food. These are the strategies that will keep the flu from spreading.’
Koenigsknecht said overall, the isolation tactic was not the problem but rather the execution of that tactic.
‘I think it’s something they’ll be able to work on,’ Koenigsknecht said. ‘But I think it’s something they need to work on.’
Lynne said the experience left her worried and frustrated.
‘Overall, I was pretty unhappy and I was really worried as a parent,’ she said. ‘I think the plan was good, but there must have been some sort of breakdown of communication somewhere because it wasn’t implemented well.’
She said his experience may lead to other students avoiding isolation, which could be a danger to the student body.
‘I know that Ian has some friends that were sick that were not going to go to health services because they don’t want to be quarantined, did not want to go through what he went through,’ she said. ‘It’s silly because he protected his three roommates, but he was a kid who was unprepared.’
‘As an out-of-state parent . . . one of my concerns was, ‘what if my kid gets sick, who’s going to take care of him,” she said. ‘I was told, ‘oh yeah, that’s all in place.”
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This is terrible. Are students with the flu just expected to pack up all the necessary belongings and go? Many students living in dorm-style buildings (like Myles) don’t even have all the household items they would need to live in isolation for a week. For example, they don’t have kitchens, so they probably don’t have a lot of dishes to take with them. And moving alone, which many students do every year, is stressful enough when you’re well, let alone when you’ve got swine flu. Would it be so hard to require an RA-on-call to help a student move in a situation like this? Like, not just handing them a checklist, but behaving like an actual compassionate and useful human being? This is shameful behavior on the part of the university; it makes me think the administrators responsible for these decisions don’t even consider the logistics imposed by the typical student lifestyle. Not surprising considering how detached they are.
Why didn’t this student simply use one of the multiple available grocery delivery services? Peapod by Stop n’ Shop is one that comes readily to mind, and will deliver groceries (including whatever “fluids” he’d like) to his dorm room for a small fee. Certainly much, much less than what his mother paid to ship him food from another state. <p/>It surprises me that this student doesn’t appear to be aware that grocery delivery exists. So, sinceit would appear students don’t know how to get groceries and important supplies from the store in isolation, why isn’t BU Health Services informing these students that grocery delivery is an option of which they can take easily and quickly advantage?