Out cold: The inevitability of sickness

By: Christine Chow

It’s a swift and effective ambush that sweeps across Hamilton by night, catching Mac students unaware as they toss and turn in their beds, dreaming of a life where midterms and assignments don’t exist. For those who have not yet been infected, I say to you with caution: beware the common cold. Laugh all you like, but when you (inevitably) find yourself trying to clear that persistent, gunky feeling from your throat, know it’s only a matter of time before you’re next.

Getting sick doesn’t really seem like a big deal until you remember that those fictitious midterms are, in fact, real, and happening with or without you. Particularly with the new MSAF modifications, one would have no choice but to believe it is absolutely vital to haul your sorry, infectious butt to class, lest you miss that one lecture that turns

out to be a quarter of the final exam. But this is exactly how colds propagate, and in a school of over 30,000 students, there’s just no escaping it.

The key to surviving both school and sickness is to get rid of the sickness fast. The best way to do that? Sleep. Anything less than seven hours not only increases your susceptibility to a cold, but also decreases the production of cytokine proteins and antibodies that regulate sleep patterns and fight off infections in the immune system respectively. Don’t stay up until 3 a.m. just so you can squeeze in that one last Avenue quiz, especially if it means you’ll be keeling over in your morning lecture the next morning.

Keeping yourself hydrated allows your body to function normally and to flush toxins from your system. If your throat feels like sandpaper every time you open your mouth to speak,

eating ice chips provides an interesting alternative to tossing back that mundane eight-glasses-a-day requirement you’ll probably never fulfill, as it relieves both thirst and irritation.

Similarly, while hot liquids like broth, tea, chicken soup, which has anti-inflammatory properties, and Neocitran (a personal favourite) might not deal with the direct cause of sickness, they do help tackle some of the symptoms associated with the common cold.

It’s important to ease up on your intake of caffeine and alcohol while you’re feeling under the weather, as they actually cause dehydration and make it harder for you to reach your daily quota. Instead of staying out late and deceiving yourself into thinking a morning coffee will solve all your problems, consider a good night’s rest instead. You’ll scare off less people without an overactive microbiome at your back.

Above all, the key to surviving a bad cold is to have the right mentality. Sure, you’ve been turned into a temporary mouth-breather, your nose is a leaky tap, and you have a headache that makes it feel like elephants are trampling your brain, but take a look around: everyone else is sick too. So until some sort of system is implemented that allows us to miss class without reaping the consequences, shameless plug for the advantages of podcasted lectures here, cue the melodramatics if you must, but remember that it’ll pass. How soon is entirely—well, mostly—up to you.