The Fall is a time for pumpkin picking, apple picking, leaf picking, but most importantly; illness. Here are the three worst diseases I have come encounter with this Fall. Pneumonia Recently my roommate contracted Pneumonia and was hospitalized for 4 days and returned back to New Jersey for a week. Now for all you doctors and residency students you are probably thinking “yea of course pneumonia sucks,” but it is a completely different thing to have it in a dorm room. Confined space is where disease thrives, and me walking back into a room smelling of puke, gastric acid and lysol was quite possibly the worst sick cocktail smell of all time. He stared me in the face said “I have a fever of 103.8, I think something’s wrong.” Luckily I grew up in a medical household and have contracted every disease you can think of, strep, mono, scarlet fever. So I knew that he wasn’t doing to great. After three hours in the ER they finally said I could leave him and I returned back to the dorm. For the next three days I couldn’t bring myself to enter into the room with the smells and finally got some of the girls down the hall to do a cleansing. My roommate returned healthy after a little more than a week, and the room now smells of sweet Lysol. Pink Eye I don’t know if it was bad luck or the fact that I was due to deal with my roommates illnesses but, as you can guess my other roommate got pink eye as well. Woke up one morning with the real deal, crusted up hot pink no white anywhere to be seen under his eyelids. Luckily this was easier to deal with then the Pneumonia clean up, this was just an act of mere avoidance. We attempted to quarantine him when possible, but other times just made him wear gloves. Did he like it, no but like any other person I was not trying to contract pink eye. Between hospital visits for pneumonia and the pink eye break out I now own more hospital gloves and masks then the hospital itself (I also managed to get a hospital gown that made a great halloween costume, so there were some positives). image: https://forum.facmedicine.com/data/MetaMirrorCache/4e22276b90476321cd4817344414ad9f.jpg Poison Ivy Now this one I can speak from true experience as it is currently still clearing up on my arm as I type this up. Poison Ivy, the most annoying allergic reaction known to man. After tailgating before one of the college game days I found myself rigourously scratching my arm, after a couple days it wasn’t just my arm though. Full chest, hips, arms and legs itchy as ever. I was first advised to use the topical creams, such as cortizone 10 and calamine lotion. Both did absolutely nothing to stop the spreading or the itch, so it was time to whip out the heavy guns. In come the steroids. Tapering them for 3 weeks I experienced some of the side effects and I can’t say it was a good time. Insomnia was the worst of them, sleepless nights or falling asleep at 4 am was pretty common. Needless to say I did get a lot of work or Netflix done in my extra hours, but the body fatigue outweighed the pros. Luckily the side effects faded over time and are not causing me problems anymore, now it just has to clear and myself and my dorm room will be illness free. This fall was illness packed, but I have made it out alive, even though my room still has an underlying smell of puke and my arm still looks like a tomato. Comment below if you have any stories of Fall College Illnesses. Source
