I HATE EVERYTHING!: I want my lozenges!

I would be famous. Newspapers would write about how I had brought SARS to Connecticut, the CDC would grill everyone I had made contact with in the last weeks, and suddenly everyone would refer to me as Patient Zero.

Of course, I didn’t really have SARS, or anything remotely that serious, but I still felt like garbage. So, like all students should in times of poor health, I made the trek this past Saturday to our Health Center. But, like all the best laid plans of mice and men, it was closed.

Let me state this up front, I realize that there were signs on the front doors saying to call security. I called the health center (after it reopened, obviously) and was informed that nurses were constantly on duty and if paged would have quickly come back to campus. While in transit, security (all trained EMTs) would make sure you were okay. So, maybe there were so few students on campus that keeping the health center open would have been absurd.

But, there were a lot of students and visitors on campus this past weekend. On Saturday we had what is consistently our biggest sporting turnout every (other) year, when hundreds of Notre Dame fans come to watch the lacrosse game. And, if there were so few students on campus then why was there food service in the Dolan School of Business for three and a half hours? I didn’t even need the health center open for that long, I only needed 20 minutes.

I realize I only had a bad cold, but I feel like closing the health center while students are on campus opens this university up to a huge lawsuit. Isn’t time a factor in illness? Don’t all those stickers on bathroom mirrors tell us never to sleep things off? What if I had been bitten by a rabid raccoon outside the health center thus infusing my body with the entire family tree of the rhabdovirus family? Even Louis Pasteur knew that the risk of contracting rabies would be greatly reduced if the vaccine is administered as soon as possible.

Students at this school always complain about how the Health Center only gives out salt and throat lozenges. But on Saturday, that’s all I wanted.