weekly breakdown 8/26–9/1

Erin Song
Erin Song
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read

Currently: sounds like a dying beluga whale every time I talk.

I’m not sure if it’s unfortunate that I got sick within a week of staying in Berkeley, or if it’s fortunate that I didn’t get sick during a more critical time involving more midterms and project due dates. Due to being bedridden for the past week, I don’t have many updates to share, so I hope you bear with this comparatively drier post.

Weekly Breakdown

  • getting sick: I generally don’t get sick very often (maybe once a year), but when I do, my immune system does the bare minimum to keep me alive as I hack and cough my lungs out for a good month or two. Interestingly enough, I don’t think I started getting sick to the point of being bedridden until college. Whether it’s due to the increased levels of stress, poorer eating habits, or my immune system simply aging is up for debate. I’m just hoping that I recover within a week of midterms.
  • guilt of stagnancy: On that note, I feel that my mental health takes a solid toll whenever I get sick as well. My ability to work or concentrate has dramatically decreased, and on Wednesday I found myself in such a feeble state that I had to take the day off. Although I knew it was the right thing to do to take care of myself, I found myself fighting my innate self loathing for failing to get anything done. The guilt that emerged from feeling behind in everything debatably made me feel even worse than my physical sickness. I wrote on my struggles to accept the presence of life events outside of my control before, and I feel like this is one of the things that I have to accept that I can’t really change for the time being. It’s an ability that I’m trying to significantly improve, and I feel this is one of the times I must practice it.
  • recovery process: Amidst all the DIY home remedies I concocted with my paltry college student budget, I found that the (likely to be expired) cough drops, gallons of hot water, and hours of extra sleep did little compared to the steaming hot cup of ramen I heated in the microwave for 3 minutes. Having lived in a household that didn’t use medicine to treat sickness (aside from a very disgusting tasting bottle of cough syrup my mother used for every medical problem up until I was 5), I was somewhat surprised when someone suggested that I buy cold medicine. Don’t get me wrong — I knew that cold medicine existed. I knew that people took it. I just didn’t put two and two together and consider that I could use it as well. It was such a foreign concept to use cold medicine that I felt somewhat embarrassed asking my friend what kinds of medicine people used. I definitely feel that I should look into them, because I really don’t want to go into classes and interviews having to cough violently every five seconds.

Unfortunately, due to staying exclusively in my room or on campus, this past week has included a disappointing lack of dogs. I vowed to myself to make it up once I’m able to recover :)

    Erin Song

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    Erin Song

    experimental writing dump

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