Between dining hall food, shared bathrooms and no sleep, it’s easy to get sick in college. Here’s how it usually goes.

Pre-Sickness Anxiety

You hear someone cough a couple times in your Monday morning lecture. You’ve heard about this, you think you’re prepared. You start to see more and more runny-nosed and red-eyed zombies walking around. Slowly your friends start dropping off, succumbing to the sickness that is tearing through campus. You’re pounding Emergen-C like it is the tears of Jesus and you realize that it’s only 9 a.m. and you’ve used Purell on your hands six times today.

The Beginning of the End

You wake up with a bit of a tickle in your throat. And so maybe your throat is a little bit sore too. You make yourself a cup of tea and you calmly go about your day. Sure, your nose started running in your afternoon class but it was probably nothing. By the end of the day, your throat hurts a little bit more and maybe you’ve got a bit of a headache, but so what? You had a long day, you must just be tired.

Denial

Symptoms keep piling on. With every cough or sneeze your friends scoot their chair a little bit away from you in the dining hall. People start to avoid sitting next to you in class. But you refuse to admit that you are sick, that would mean that your immune system isn’t superior to the others’. You continue all of your normal activities, dealing with and ignoring the things happening in your body.

Full-Blown Sickness

OK, so you can’t really deny it anymore, and to be honest, you can’t even get out of bed. You lay for hours watching Netflix movies and sleeping, while your friends check in every hour to make sure you haven’t died yet. You’ve called your mom crying three times in one day. You drag your sorry butt to class in an outfit that should never be seen by the public, and you sit in your chair doing nothing except trying not to implode.

Avoiding the Health Center

Your friends are nagging you to go to a doctor and finally deal with it, but you’ve got a better idea. You go to CVS and clean out their shelves of anything with the words Cold and Flu Relief. You insist that the DayQuil and NyQuil that you have become dependent on are working, even though you are a little bit worried that your liver could give out at any minute. There is no way you are going to the useless health center.

Succumbing to Peer Pressure

So the home-remedies and over-the-counters have stopped working and you can’t deal with the sickness anymore. You silently curse your friends as you sit in the waiting room of the health center with about 60 other students that look exactly like you do. The waiting seems endless, you’ll surely die here. Finally, your name is called from the clipboard and you walk in as if you’re walking to your own execution.

On the Mend

You’re still bitter about the over-priced medicine that you were prescribed, but you’re finally starting to feel better. The mountain of tissues on your desk is dwindling and your roommate can finally sleep through the night without your coughing to wake them up at 4 a.m. You promise yourself that you’ll never let yourself get sick again until the next plague starts.