Mano y Mono: Getting mono in college

Just when you think you have your life together, you don’t

Here’s a riddle:

What disease causes you to lie on your back for months at a time, sweating and being frustrated about things you can’t change, and forces you to give up things you worked for?

If you asked one of my father’s chain emails, he would probably say ‘liberalism’. Then he would go back to furiously lamenting over when cans were invented and ‘water in plastic bottles, why didn’t I think of that’ while taking pictures of his thumb on his flip phone.

No, that’s not it, although the ailment I’m referring to is just as common among college students (Hah! That one’s for you, Dad).

Over the past two months, Mononucleosis: the dreaded kissing disease put me on my ass faster than a Game of Thrones drinking game.

Every time someone you love dies, take 14 shots

Going mano y Mono with the Epstein-Barr virus was not how I wanted to spend my Spring Break, or the remainder of my spring semester, but I thought that speaking as a survivor might ease the pain of those who face this exhausting illness in the future and everyone I managed to infect in the past few months. 

I have glass bones and paper skin

Fun facts about Mononucleosis:

Mono is spread through saliva, thus dubbed the ‘kissing disease’. Of course if you’re a total social recluse like me, there are plenty of other ways that EBV can infiltrate your system. Sharing drinks, sharing food, toothbrushes (ew) or just being around a really spitty person can also spread Mono.

If being spread through saliva wasn’t horrifying enough, Mono can also decide to incubate itself in your system for six to eight weeks before rearing it’s ugly symptomatic head. So when you’re viciously trying to track down the asshole who contaminated you, know that it was probably someone you were in contact with a while ago. In fact, you probably left them standing outside a bar in Israel thinking your name was Chana and realizing you gave them the phone number for a Gregg’s in Tel Aviv…

For both of these reasons, and my own childish ignorance of my mental and physical health, I didn’t realize I was coming down with Mono until it was too late.

In the weeks approaching Spring Break, I started to notice that my energy level wasn’t what it used to be. I was getting extremely tired extremely fast, so much so that during my two-hour break between classes, I would have to find somewhere to collapse and fall asleep. This could be anywhere. I learned how to sleep on outdoor benches, in cozy chairs in the library and even lying on the ground in the depths of the Student Union until the janitor prodded me with a broom and asked me to leave.

In my heart and the rest of my tightening chest, I knew I was getting sick, but I chalked it up to “being a huge waste of space” and went about my stressful existence, staying up way too late to finish papers and drinking like Rick Sanchez at Stackers.

I couldn’t wait to relax, so when I got home for Spring Break and slept for 16 hours, I didn’t think anything of it. But I was still tired when I woke up, and now starting to lose my appetite. I went a whole day being offered food and not being able to eat anything. When I got home later than night, I decided I had better go right to bed. After all, I couldn’t have a cold screwing up any big Spring Break plans.

I passed out at 8:30 and woke up around 3am drenched in sweat with the stunning realization that I was going to be fantastically ill. I purged everything I’ve ever eaten from my body, and collapsed in my bed feeling like a human crockpot. I had a fever of 101. And so began my descent into hell.

The entire next week consisted of sweating through my bedsheets, sleeping 14 hours a day, being too weak for stairs and having my mother spoon ice chips directly into my mouth while I recited my nuncupative will. I felt like I was on my deathbed. Not only could I not move or register temperature anymore, but a plethora of other miserable symptoms were kicking in.

Headaches, coughing, sneezing, muscle aches, fever, chills, swollen lymph nodes and a throat that made me want to rip my tonsils out with my bare hands. Before the sky could turn dark and the oceans to blood, I had my dad take me to the doctor.

The last thing I thought I’d see before death

At first they suspected strep, judging by the grotesque state of my tonsils. But when that test came back negative and I still felt like a reanimated corpse, I had my primary care provider take a look. I don’t know who said ‘Aah’ first, me or the doctor when she asked me to open wide. I’m surprised the poor woman didn’t douse me with holy water before saying ‘I think you have Mono. In fact, you have Mono. We can do a blood test to confirm, but that’s Mono.’

Being the huge coward that I am, I opted out of the blood test and accepted her professional assessment. I did eventually get tested, which came back unsurprisingly positive.

‘Infectious’ sounds a little harsh

Usually when I go to the doctor I have a sinus infection and they prescribe me antibiotics, and after about 10 days I’m cured. That’s not the case with Mono. Part of the reason Mono seems to K.O. college students is that the only cure for it is waiting it out. That means sleeping, doing as little physical activity as you can so your spleen doesn’t burst, no alcohol for the duration of your symptoms, drinking gallons of water, and taking it really, really easy.

Lying on my back for the rest of Spring Break watching Snapchat stories from Punta Cana was depressing in itself, but what was really frustrating was the nagging feeling that I was wasting a colossal amount of time.

I was so used to being at work twice a week, going to club meetings, doing internships and managing five classes that the absence of stress translated into even more stress. Even though I emailed all my teachers and they were understanding and helpful, I was still facing a snowball effect of extending deadlines only to be met with more and more work.

I knew how hard it was going to be to recover if I stayed home any longer, and when I was still home days after Spring Break ended, the make-up work got progressively more extensive and there was nothing I could do. Each day I would mentally prepare myself for long nights in the library, when I would suddenly spike a fever, throw up, and lose consciousness again.

Every meal for three weeks

Finally after a few fever dreams and a minor existential crisis, I realized that I had to listen to my mom, my doctor, and my body. I had to focus all my energy, what little of it I had left, on physically getting better, an ordeal that would last about 6 weeks. Everything else would just have to wait. 

I’ve never been one of those people who, you know, goes to the gym or eats vegetables or does yoga on the beach at sunrise to make sure all my Chakras are aligned. I’ve always kind of assumed my Chakras are stuffed into the bottom of my backpack somewhere. I could have a mole that got bigger and darker and started shouting racial slurs at people and as long as it didn’t hurt, I’d probably ignore it.

An earlier health issue that I had totally under control

Mono was in a lesson in biofeedback that I would have liked to skip, but probably needed. I learned to interpret what my body was telling me. Things like ‘my throat is dry. . . I must be dehydrated, I need some water,’ or ‘I’d like to eat a huge plate of Chinese food, but the smell is making me gag, so I’m not going to do that,’ probably sound so simple to remember every day. 

But when you’re also thinking about five classes, two internships, three clubs, four friends and a goldfish, they’re also the simplest things to forget.

College is a shitmess. School is hard. Relationships are time consuming. Even when everything is crazy and unmanageable and you feel like your school is run by vampires who grow stronger by feeding off your time, money, and youth, remember that none of what you’re doing, or learning to do, is possible unless you’re healthy. Sometimes, or most times, you need to put your health first.

So get some rest. Eat an apple. Drink some water. Stop touching your face. Take an Emergen-C. Go outside and just breathe some air.
Because if you’ve come in contact with my saliva in the past 12 weeks, have I got some bad news for you.

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UMass Amherst