My spring break: Kleenex and cold medicine

Aaron Wells

Asst. A&E and Copy Editor

Sagebrush 3-27-2001

JR Tillett says he can't write about his Spring Break experience, because if he did the feds might corner in on him and he'd wind up on a dissection table in Area 51. But I'm going to screw him over and write about mine anyway.

I was sick.

That sums it up in exactly three words. It started with a drowsiness here at the 'Brush last Thursday that I attributed to the fact that I hadn't slept since midterms began. But, after driving down to my girlfriend's place for the weekend, I found sleep only increased my fatigue, which was joined by its friends congestion and nausea, who started a Spring Break party of their own inside my body. By Monday, driving back to Reno with my girlfriend, I was sporting a healthy feverish glow and hocking loogies every three minutes into a roll of one-ply toiled paper I swiped from the bathroom at Angie's dorm. I got back to Reno with just enough energy to collapse lifelessly. The next thing I recall was dropping Angie off at the Greyhound station on Thursday morning. Then, this devious bacterium tricked me into thinking it was in remission. By Saturday, I felt good enough to take a long walk through the park. That apparently set something off because by Sunday my fever was back and it was joined by the sensation of my right ear being caulked shut with a wad of Play Doh that just won't shake loose.

There's just something about the spring. While all of my friends are out getting romance, all of life is blooming back to vitality and the entire hemisphere is stretching its petals to make that once-a-year show... I get sick to the core of my being.

Last year I was diagnosed with chronic inflammation of the Intestines, and this year I'm diagnosed with the worst infection I've had since... ever. Maybe this is my body's way of trying to attract women.

I don't get sick any other time of year. Maybe the obligatory cold in late November, some slight allergies in the summer, just to keep up appearances. And then, when I should be feeling my best and enjoying the sights and smells of plants flowering and fertilizing all around me, and girls returning to tank tops and mini skirts, and the weather finally being nice enough to lick metal things outside again, then and only then does my immune system shut down.

I guess it's Spring Break. My white blood cells want to take a vacation too.

I blame my parents. They were both teachers, and stressed no virtue more than perfect attendance at school. Most years from elementary school to graduation, I was awarded a pretty orange "perfect attendance" certificate to put under my bed with all the others. Miraculously, while other kids were constantly being sent to the hospital and missing weeks of school with the harrowing plagues of primary education, I remained unscathed.

But it was the same then as it is now. My body didn't actually conquer every invading germ. Instead, it threw them in a holding cell, perhaps my spleen, and when the next big vacation hit me, it threw open the latch and let them battle it out for themselves. Sort of like a gladiatorial tournament, except with microbes. And finally, to top it off, my immune system itself would enter the arena, perhaps my thyroid gland, to the screaming cheers of thousands of red blood cells, and vanquish the winner of the tournament.

At least, in theory. Usually during my annual spring illness my immune system would lounge around lazily while I went out and bought antibiotics to do its work for it. I imagine that, at the end of the gladiatorial combat, it watched from the emperor's chair and stuck its thumb down when the antibiotics had the germ under their feet, ready to slit its belly and flood the ground with whatever germs have inside them instead of blood.

Cytoplasm, perhaps.