In Which Our Hero's Plans are Thwarted by Mono

December 8, 2005 by David Blackman

Being sick at college is not nearly as much fun. Sicknesses aren't the compact 24-hour bugs of old, but long, drawn-out affairs that never seem to improve because you spend four nights a week diverting your body's attention toward metabolizing ethanol instead of fighting the disease. You spend weeks half-awake, dizzy with a light tickle in your throat, wondering if you'll ever feel alive again. When your body finally gives up on you and decides that you are not leaving your bed, it's inevitably on one of the days of the week when you have a small section that you shouldn't skip.

Missing class to spend a day temporarily dead doesn't mean a reprieve from homework; it just takes away from time you could be working on it. Staying home doesn't hold the same charm it did when you were young and knew how wonderful being alone in your house in the middle of the day would be. In college, you can do that any day of the week by skipping physics lecture.

Your parents had a vaguely defined number in their heads of how many days you had to be sick before they'd take you to the doctor (in my case, this was 10). If I followed this rule today, I'd be going to Vaden every 10 days, and they'd start to look at me strangely.

It's cliche to beat up on Vaden, but I've been sick for a month so I'm going to take the easy way out. It's widely known that Vaden is humorously incompetent, to the point where many people try as hard as possible to avoid going there.

Two of the most popular methods of alternative medical care entail students trying to pretend they're still in elementary school -- either by relying on the nonexistent medical expertise of their parents or by waiting until a trip home to see your former pediatrician who still gives you safety pops at the end of your visits.

The first method is to call your parents and get a diagnosis based on a list of symptoms. The diagnosis is usually some combination of physical exhaustion, the flu and typhoid. I've even gone so far as to e-mail my parents a blurry cameraphone photo of a burn on my hand to ask them if they thought I needed medical attention. Why we continue to have infinite faith in our parents' medically unsound advice is beyond me. I get to pretend that my father has some medical knowledge because he was an untrained medic in the Air Force.

None of this applies to the 30 percent of Stanford students whose parents are doctors, mostly plastic surgeons. These lucky kids get to call their parents and, through the limitless power of whining, force them to remember knowledge they haven't been quizzed on since second-year med school. Their parents will usually just call in a prescription for antibiotics to a local pharmacy to shut them up, and then return to their loveless marriage -- as depicted in "The Secret Lives of Dentists."

The other option is to wait until a major holiday break and see your competent and friendly general practitioner back home. The conversation usually goes something like this: "Dr. Kugelmass, I don't feel well." "Tell me, vut are ze symptoms?" (My GP is very Russian.) "General fatigue, muscle soreness, sometimes I get really dizzy." "How many hours of sleep you get?" "Six? Maybe?" "And are you eating good?" "I usually skip lunch and have a burger and fries for dinner." "So vut you are saying is you don't take care of body and you don't feel well? Da?" "I guess." "Take a multivitamin."

If you do not have MDs for parents and it's not close to a school break, then you really only have one option left... "Hello, this is Vaden. How may we humiliate you?" "Hi, I'm having abdominal cramps and would like to make an appointment." "I've got a few openings early next week." "I'm an athlete." "Marvelous! Come in any time today."

Vaden employs dozens of nurses who get to pretend to be doctors. They have the privilege of telling you that you have strep throat or mono. This diagnosis is confirmed when they send you the results of your urinalysis -- which is always odd, because as far as you can remember, they only took blood samples. They will rush into action by putting you on the strongest antibiotics available to mankind, resulting in you breaking out in a full body rash. At which point they realize that actually, you're pregnant.

Being diagnosed with mono is one of the most useless and depressing pieces of information you're ever likely to be given. It's like being told you have the flu, but with no treatment options and no chance of getting better any time in the foreseeable future. Last year, I made a special deal with God that if it turned out I had strep and not mono, I'd stop making fun of people with promise rings. I was therefore conflicted when Vaden told me I had strep, but not to worry -- 10 days later, with no major change in my condition, they changed their diagnosis to mono. Unfortunately, though, with mono you need to spend the next year worrying that you're infecting your friends every time you share food. And no kissing... forever!

While at Vaden, I encourage you to visit the Sexual Health Peer Resource Center, where members of various queer-alliance groups pretend to be sexologists -- and in the process make straight people feel really really uncomfortable.

Sophomore year, I decided I should spend my sex dollars before they expired like a bad condom. That was a mistake. "Hey, I'd like to spend my sex dollars now," I said "Oh, what would you like to spend them on?" (I felt like a six-year-old being given a dollar to buy candy at the corner drug store -- a comparison that would become unpleasantly true soon enough.) "Can I just have my 12 condoms?" "Would you like any lubricant?" "No." I'd had a bad experience with lubricant freshman year, when my ME101 group had tried to use it to salvage our final project. "Are you sure? We have a pamphlet about it. It's not just for gay sex anymore." "No, no, just the 12 condoms." "OK then, what type would you like? Ribbed for her pleasure? For your pleasure? Cinnamon flavored? We just got in a shipment of German condoms, they're very popular. Ooh, these are strawberry." "Umm, look, could you just put some condoms in the bag, this is really uncomfortable." This exchange was only slightly more awkward than the most recent time I visited Vaden and the nurse asked me if I was sexually active. "I wish," I replied. "Is that a yes or a no?" she asked. I hate Vaden.

David Blackman could always guess the price the closest without going over. If you think your detergent-pricing skills are better and want to challenge him to a "The Price is Right" duel, e-mail him at blackmad@stanford.edu

blackmad@stanford.edu