I love Charlottesville. I especially love it in the fall when the leaves are changing and everything has a golden glow and smells kind of like apples and pumpkins and Halloween. I am happy with my living situation. Apart from the constant back-burner urge to see my family, I really have very few reasons to want to make the 10-hour trek home. Until, that is, the heavy hand of illness strikes me down temporarily.
As I said, fall is my favorite season. The air is crisp and blessedly free of humidity and to me it just feels nostalgically wonderful. But you know what comes with fall: cold and flu season. Growing up in a house with two doctors I was always aware of the increased business which accompanied that spike in viral and bacterial activity. Occasionally my typically steely immune system would even succumb to some pathogen floating around. But being sick at home never seemed like that big of a deal (at least until you were trying to high jump and had to lay down between each attempt because of the evil symptoms of strep throat); it was just something mildly unpleasant you got and then you got over.
Something about being in college seems to have created the perfect storm of illness for me. I don't know if it's the fact that, as I have mentioned, I eat terribly, or whether it has something to do with the climate or the number of people I come into contact with, but here in Charlottesville I get sick more often and with greater severity than I ever did at home. Now before you start wondering, I am going to have the gall to assert that I am not the hypochondriacal sort. Ask anyone that I have lived with - I will not tell you I'm sick until I am sick, and possibly not even then. (On a related note, if you know any of my second-year roommates and have a strong stomach, ask about the dying dinosaur episode. That's all I will say for now.) On the other hand, I am also that person who gets the flu shot but still gets the flu and who gets some other sort of distressing illness at least once a year.
So now we have established that I am qualified, if not uniquely then adequately, to talk about the ills of being ill. I will proceed to make a sweeping generalization that I will stand by come hell or high water: Nothing makes you want to go home more than being sick. There is nothing like that first wave of nausea or that moment when you are so stuffed up you think you might actually suffocate to make you wish you were at home in your bed with your mom looking out for you. There's something about having someone who actually wants to bring you soup and make sure you are OK that just makes the experience so much more bearable.
That's not to say that when I was sick as a child I was mollycoddled into a comfortable, cold medicine induced torpor, far from it. The policy in the Davis household was that if you did not have a fever of more than 100 degrees or you were not actively throwing up, you dragged your whiny butt to school. As you might imagine, this had some unpleasant results on a few occasions, but for the most part I think it just prepared my brother and me for the future. In fact, I directly attribute my stellar attendance record these days to that particular parental policy.
Sometimes we really were sick and we were kept out of school, but even then it was far from illness utopia. I can distinctly remember days when I was sick and I would go to work with my mom to spend the entire day sleeping on the floor of her office. When I got older sometimes I would just stay home alone, glued to the couch. But I maintain vehemently that I would readily trade the comfiest bed at school for that nubby office carpet or my deserted living room at home when I got really sick.
When I was first considering this column, I was thinking that maybe the desire to go home when you are sick was just another one of those tenacious remainders from childhood I'm so fond of writing about. I was proven wrong when my grandmother told me a story about when she got dreadfully ill while on a trip to Chicago and all she wanted was to go home (though apparently room service is the next best thing to your mom bringing you soup). So even if it is a childhood instinct, the longing to go home when you are sick also persists throughout a lifetime. I think it really does boil down to the desire for someone who really wants to care for you, or at least the comfort of the place where you feel most at home.
Alex's column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at a.davis@cavalierdaily.com.
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