Apparently, there has been a small outbreak of the swine flu in the psychology folks at Akron. One of Dr. Snell’s students got it, and now everyone is kind of freaking out. The department chair sent out an email telling us all to let our students stay home without penalty if they say they are not feeling well—no need of a doctor’s note or anything. [I wonder how many people will totally take advantage of this…]. One of my students, who has been out of class for a week now, came to my office the other day covered in sweat and saying that he has been feeling really ill and was having a hard time walking. I told him to call the health center immediately, but I don’t think he did.
Today I felt absolutely miserable, and was torn about going to school or staying home. I laid in bed until the last possible second, and then decided to go to school (looking like crap, as a natural result of the lateness). I made it through like half of the day in a zombie-like state, and then after consulting with a few people, decided to take their advice and “GO HOME NOW!!”.
The rest of the day I have spent in bed, watching Planet Earth and typing up my Voc study guide (oh, help us all…). John made us dinner tonight and even served it to me and brought me Kool-Aid and a cold wash cloth for my head. Amazing! I took a couple of quizzes on Facebook, one of which told me that I am 70% black. Enlightening. Just for kicks, I also Googled my own name, and was sad to note that only two of the websites that came up (even after searching pages and pages) were actually me.
I think the rest is doing good things for me, but I feel like I won’t be able to stay home tomorrow. I’m helping out with a Safe Zone training for the RAs on campus, and I don’t want to miss that. I am pretty sure it is just exhaustion or a cold and not really the flu, but I feel kind of bad knowing I could totally skip out on my responsibilities and nobody would question it given the current epidemic. I wouldn’t do that though, unless it was truly necessary. Then there wouldn’t be any guilt anyhow.