BERICK: Health care

Sick can mean a lot of different things. When sick doesn’t mean the hospital, or that you have the vocabulary of a Californian seventh grader, it usually means increased introspection, because, almost by definition, being sick slows you down. Just think of the variety of ways the drug industry has tried to convey the lethargy of a bad cold or the flu. Advertisements for cough medicine go so far as to submerge actors in icy ponds, traffic jams and giant plastic bubbles to dramatize the everyday agony of being sick. In this syrupy state, you can learn a lot about yourself ‘- for example, just how low your tolerance is for bad television, what your standards of hygiene are or how firm your faith in modern medicine is. Also enlightening: what your real comfort food is, how much you really mean to your roommates and how much you really miss your mother. And finally, does Student Health Services secretly hope that you’ll perish? Fewer patients, shorter waits? Well that last one doesn’t really inspire self-reflection, but inquiring minds want to know.

‘ My roommates and I have all been sick recently. We’ve had colds, flus and et Cetera, and in the process, spent hours walking that tired triangle between Student Health Services, CVS and our kitchen. I myself went straight to Ramen chicken flavor, but if you find yourself in a pinch, the roast chicken is just as nice. A note to vegetarians: I can’t be certain but I’m pretty sure the chicken flavor never has and never will have anything to do with actual chicken, in case this sounds tempting. When I was sick my mother would always fix me chicken Ramen. If you are thinking this isn’t quite your normal American chicken noodle soup, you are right, its better. My mother would start with vegetables, some you’ve probably heard of and some you haven’t, and tofu. Then sliced ginger, a whole spice rack, lemon and some of the flavor packet, because being sick doesn’t mean you should overload on sodium, ‘you really don’t need all of that.’ In about five minutes you’d have Comfort Food. In college, I now take a few short cuts and I always add the whole packet, but the overall effect is still the same, especially when the slurped noodles splatter all over the kitchen table, the newspaper and all other paper goods within a four foot radius.

My parents taught me processed foods and stealing were wrong when I was in preschool, and in that order. For those of you without this moral code, Ramen may not seem like such an indulgence. One of my roommates craves her mother’s handmade potato soup ‘- which isn’t available for .67 cents at Tedeschi. Neither is the ultimate sick food for my other roommate, Bree, a Texas fast food chain aptly named Whattaburger.’ Both foods are expensive plane rides away. I tried to placate both girls with the ubiquitous college cure. In our defense, alcohol was a widely trusted medical treatment for centuries. Orange tea with lemon, honey and increasing amounts of brandy touched up a whole apartment of us and kept us warm through endless channel searching.

The real reflection starts when the chores run out. When you’ve already bought more tissues and have abandoned tea bags and lemon rinds for later. When using the remote is the most vigorous activity you’ve engaged in all day, it tends to leave much more than enough time to feel nine kinds of rotten. The kind of rotten you get from watching a very bad television show’hellip; or worse, the epically bad ‘Australia.’ This is not to be confused with the type of rotten you feel even though your couch-mate has it worse. Or the type of rotten you feel when you finally realize you haven’t been working on your independent study for weeks. Or the type of rotten you feel when you know your mother could make it better if you only hadn’t left the region. Whose idea was college anyhow? And while you’re at it ‘- what are you going to do when it’s over in a few months? Now you know the worst complication for the flu may not be pneumonia at all, it’s probably just the ever-common Fear of Graduation, though symptoms may be similar.

Experts say that a person who is choking and able to cough is not to be worried about as much as someone choking silently. In the context of food at least, coughing ‘- while loud, terrifying and occasionally suggestive of a rattling bronchial death ‘- is a good sign, demonstrating the effort of the body to rid itself of the problem, or at the very least, it alerts a small audience to your danger. It is fundamentally akin to the mating rituals of exotic birds and middle school girls. Being sick is a little like choking ‘- the flailing is very important. It would be easy to curl up quietly, but occasionally it’s better to make a fuss, because in a school of 30,000, someone’s bound to come to your rescue.