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Exclusives: Comparative Life February
27, 2002: By Kristen Albertsen '02 February 2002: a month of love (Valentine's Day), patriotism (Winter Olympics), and the flu (the epidemic of stomach flu scourging the Princeton campus, to be exact). When I checked the Princeton homepage one gray winter morning earlier this month, I nearly laughed aloud to find a front-page announcement crying, "Stomach flu hits campus!" (punctuation mine). Certainly the Princeton webmaster could drum up some more noteworthy news, I thought. Hasn't there been an alumnus who donated $20 million recently? Ten million, at least? But the stomach flu alert (issued by McCosh Health Center after a glut of patients filled beds and buckets during the first week of February) was more dire than I had realized. Following fast on the sleepless and hardly hygienic week and weekend of club bicker, sign-ins, and initiations, the stomach flu went for the jugular (or the small intestine, as it were). More than 50 students were admitted to McCosh Health Center during the first week and a half of the new semester, and at least that number, if not many more, have been admitted since then. And then there were the countless masses who, like myself, suffered in silence: an agonizing 24 hours of nausea, fever, chills, and — for once — no care in the world except to feel better. I caught the stomach flu as it entered the twilight of its tyranny — nearly 50 percent of my friends had had it earlier that week, and I had sympathetically but smugly sat at their bedsides and helped them to sip water. By the time Friday rolled around, most people were feeling sufficiently well to start making plans for Saturday night in celebration of their recovery. I too looked forward to a fun weekend happily spent with healthy friends. The whole world — more accurately, my stomach — turned upside-down the next morning. I awoke with the telltale symptoms of nausea, sweat, aches, and general inability to move, much less roll over. I spent the entire day in my one-room single, in bed. I've since tried to recall an entire day spent in bed my whole four years here at college; I don't think it's ever occurred. This past Saturday was a milestone, a rite of passage, a once-in-a-college-career. I spent the day deliriously moaning and recalling happier days of childhood illness, which meant a day off from school and a chance to lie on the couch watching TV and being pampered by Mom. I had gotten the "sick day" down to a science: sleep until 10, at which point "The Price is Right" game show would come on, followed by Mom's macaroni and cheese and a movie in the afternoon. The current state of things, this nefarious stomach flu, was obviously divine punishment for skipping so many days of long division and handwriting practice. Apparently I wasn't such a delinquent student, in the end, for I was only damned to bed for a day. Come Saturday evening I was able to crawl out of bed and check my email; come Saturday night, I was sufficiently well to bitterly resent all my healthy friends out having fun. Come Sunday morning, I was almost fully recovered, and I believe it's just a matter of days before McCosh removes their apocalyptic announcement from the Princeton homepage. Until then, however, does anyone want to tuck me in and make me some macaroni and cheese?
You can reach Kristen at albertsn@princeton.edu
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