Cold Season by Rebecca
Is it me, or has cold and flu season come much earlier this year? I feel like everyone around me is sick. A girl in my hall was in the hospital on Friday for a respiratory infection! I’m fighting off something myself. Everything spreads quickly down the hall. This cold that’s going on has spread down the floor faster than gossip spreads. It’s times like these when the shuttles really come in handy. When you’re sick and you don’t have a car or don’t want to walk all the way to the other side of the world to get your car from Lot 12 (luckily there’s an on-campus shuttle that goes there, or I’d never drive my car anywhere!) you can take the off campus shuttle to Wal-Mart. My friends Morgan and Leah had to go there the other night to pick up Nyquil.
I was glad my mom packed me to be prepared for this. My mom is way more organized than I am. She packs for vacations weeks in advance and creates elaborate Excel spreadsheets filled with what we all need to bring. I, on the other hand, packed for this past weekend home at 3:45. I left BG at 4:00. So needless to say, my mom thought of everything when I was packing for college. Thanks to her, I have practically my own pharmacy in my room. I really appreciated that when I started feeling this cold coming on. My roommate laughs at my little first aid kit and my stock of medication, but she’ll learn to appreciate it the first time she gets sick this year and needs to borrow some Nyquil. Boy, did I appreciate that last night. I was able to make it to (and feel semi-human during) my 8 a.m. class.
Being sick for the first time away from home was a wake-up call for me. Yeah, yeah, it’s only a cold. You’re probably thinking I’m a baby. But it made me think about the future. I tend to get sick a lot, and I rely on my mom to take care of me every time. Usually that’s not a problem, because that’s her job and she signed up for this when she had me, but when I’m about 190 miles away it’s a little bit of a different situation. It’s not like my mom can come up to BG and make me Kool Aid and “sick soup” when I’m not feeling well. It really made me realize that I really am on my own now, and though I’m living on campus with a roommate, I really am independent.
I do like many aspects of that, but there are some things about dependent life that I miss like my dad making me breakfast on Saturday mornings, or my mom doing my laundry, or my younger brother waking me up in the morning. Really makes me wonder what it’ll be like when I’m really on my own in an apartment or a house. Hmm…
Till next time,
Rebecca