In times of need, have friends indeed…
I hadn’t had a shitty week in a while, but enough things went wrong this last weekend that made me realize that I was overdue for a few unfortunate incidents.
But, when Hurricane Shit hit my neighborhood over the last few days, I was lucky enough to have a few of my friends really help me out and make the the best of the undesirable times…
It all started on Saturday morning at about 8:30 when I jumped out bed and frantically made my way into the bathroom. I felt, well, shitty. I hadn’t been awake five minutes and I’d already lost about half a pound of bodily fluids and waste. Thanks to a combination of what I would later find out was dehydration and food poisoning, I was puking my guts out.
Fast forward to about noon, and I’d tried eating part of a banana, a bowl of cereal, and drinking water. None of those, however, was able to stay down. I’d been relentlessly yakking for hours. My stomach ached, I had the chills, and there was no sign of any improvement.
I was a gross, writhing mess.
My housemates — acting more as my own personal nurse corps during this whole ordeal — sat in my room and comforted me. They offered me various remedies, snacks, and drinks in hopes of curing my malady. At that point, I had no idea what was wrong with me and it was mostly nice knowing that if I was going to die that day, at least a few people would know what happened.
After another couple of hours of uncontrollable dry-heaving and feeling awful, I finally decided it was time to visit the emergency room. One of my housemates donated her car while another pair of them drove me to the ER. They were awesome.
Claira and Hunter grabbed everything I could possibly need and helped me into the Ali-mobile (your average silver Toyota sedan) and we arrived promptly at the hospital. They explained the whole situation to the check-in nurse and brightened up my mood by cracking jokes about the funny looking nurses. Once I got in my room, they were even more motherly. I wasn’t allowed to drink any water, for fear that I wouldn’t be able to hold it down, and they boycotted liquids in support of my pain. By six o’clock, I was out of the ER and on my way to consume a huge bowl of pho (what my doctor prescribed for my ailment). I was hungry, considering that I hadn’t eaten for 24 hours.
During the whole ordeal at the emergency room, one of the nurses was shuffling my sheets around while my phone was entangled in them. Her activity caused my phone to come flying out of the depressingly white sheets and onto the floor. My phone was already a couple years old and had most of the screen cracked from a biking accident a couple months prior, but that fall put my phone out of its misery because it wouldn’t turn on afterward. I hadn’t worried about it too much considering the amount of pain I was in, but c’mon, I’m a college student, in the communication department, who just broke his his iPhone. It was a heavy blow.
A couple days later, I mentioned to a friend how I had broke my phone and they told me how they had their old iPhone 5S lying around and they offered it to me. I refused at first, and then offered some cash for it instead, but they insisted. After a few somewhat heated arguments about it, I eventually gave in to Hailey and accepted her gracious offer. I am on a college student’s budget and I needed a phone quick, and the fact that she had asked her dad about it and he said it was fine had helped me accept it.
To make my weekend even better, the day after my vacation to the emergency room, my computer overheated and crashed. I was able to reboot it, but it was running extremely slow and I could tell something was wrong. After realizing how little free space I had on my computer, I knew what the problem was. But how to solve the problem of giving my hard drive some breathing room, I did know. So, naturally, I approached one of my housemates that’s a CSE major (computer science and engineering), thinking that he’d teach me the best way to get the job done. He patiently walked me through how to partition my external hard drive and transfer all my files to it and then delete all the extra files on my computer’s hard drive.
I’d never delved so deep into my computer.
But after the session with Bruno, I had removed over 130 GB of junk and my computer’s performance reflected the work with faster overall speed.
Despite the weekend filled with sickness and possibly expensive inconveniences, my tremendous friends made it all the better with their caring actions toward me. I learned that people have friends not just for going out and spending time together for fun, but also for the times when you need a helping hand. Not everybody would be willing to to do the things that some of my friends have done for me in the past week, and I’m very appreciative of their kindness. They helped relieve me of a lot of time, stress, and money, and I’m very grateful to have acquired friends such as them.
I hope that you can surround yourself with the people that are willing to make sacrifices for you. Those are the best of friends, anyways.
