I think that I'm getting sick. Not that this is a new thing for me at all. Quite the contrary: My college career has been frequently punctuated by bouts of everything from a minor sniffle to a full-on case of a pretty viscous flu. Add to that the occasional allergy flare-up (nothing too serious, just some itchy eyes and a stuffy nose when I run out of Claritin or there's too much of whatever mysterious allergen provokes my responses floating around), and it's more or less safe to say that I use up my fair share of Baltimore's antihistamine supply.
Over the years, I've noticed that my illnesses have increased sharply in number since I entered college. Of course, when I lived in the dorms, this was easy to explain. The frenzied lifestyle, in close proximity with others, sharing a bathroom in relatively unsanitary conditions, combined with the no-sleep lifestyle fostered by a place where you can find activity raging at 3 a.m., is hardly conducive to good health (which I read requires balanced nutrition, lots of rest and somewhat less binge drinking). So I was hardly surprised when, in my first few months of school as a freshman, I was frequently suffering from, at the least, a cold. What's more, given the aforementioned close living conditions, which are only slightly less conducive to the spread of disease than those in, say, 13th-century London, often ensure that once one is sick, efforts to get better will lead to a temporary improvement, only to meet with re-infection as the bug makes its rounds.
In the 14th century, the Black Death devastated the population of Europe. During the colonization of the Americas, smallpox introduced by Europeans killed large numbers of the native populations. During construction of the Panama Canal, yellow fever killed off scores of workers.
And in 1998, the Brendan Plague came to AMR II.
Now, I've always kind of thought that my friends over-emphasized the impact that the plague had on our house that year. After all, there were no religious processions through the halls, begging God with acts of bloody penitence and self-flagellation to remove this curse from us. There were no doctors, clad in NIH isolation suits or medieval masks to keep out the bad air, roaming from Adams to Baker and back again, helpless in the face of the disease. There were no air drops of food and medicine by the UN, and there were no wheelbarrows of corpses awaiting burial in a shallow common grave in the courtyard outside. But nonetheless, they insist on its devastating effect and, from a scholarly perspective, its consequent historical importance.
In the first semester of the 1998-1999 school year, I was a freshman at JHU, peacefully residing at the end of the hall in good old Adams 301, surrounded by the friends, schoolwork and surreptitious booze that make a freshman's life complete. Sure, between the lack of sleep, the poor and irregular feedings and (at least during Orientation) the sudden changes in temperature from 90 degrees outside to 20-below inside (e.g. Shriver Hall), we had our fair share of sniffles and colds, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. And it was during this time that I developed the greatest of my many medical discoveries: the cure of colds through a strict regime of Advil Cold and Sinus and those bottles of awful-tasting OJ that they sell in Levering, the Depot, etc.
Then I got sick. It seemed at first to be nothing more than a particularly virulent cold, which seemed to take longer than usual to shake. But then everyone else started to get sick. People started to drop like flies before the mighty power of what came to be dubbed "the Brendan Plague." I can't remember if this was before the bloody civil war between the pro-Brendan and pro-S forces which decimated my class and eventually determined what I was to be called by my peers, or whether it was simply named by people who liked to use my oft-dropped mesonym. It was a long time ago, after all, and the memories are painful, what with the tremendous suffering involved and all. The short version is that, as is the case with all catastrophic events, the affected began to look for a scapegoat, and before long, I was being chased through the halls of AMR II by mobs bearing scythes and torches, cursing me for bringing this horrific judgment upon them. I was accused of poisoning the wells, and frequently threatened with burning at the stake for my alleged congress with the Evil One.
Well, actually, they just named the outbreak after me. But everyone was really sick. And they were a little pissed. Kind of. Or maybe they were just kidding.
In any case, the culminating act of the Brendan Plague drama was when one of my hallmates, in addition to contracting a cold, also got conjunctivitis, and probably a few other things. We thought at the time that it could have been the Black Death, but that theory's fallen out of favor lately. In any case, despite my protestations, she insisted that it was a case of my eponymous plague, or insisted as well as she could at the time, given that she spent the majority of the week strung out on Nyquil.
Eventually, of course, the plague subsided, and life returned to normal, or at least to the normal routine of disease and recovery, and soon the Brendan Plague began to fade into the memory of history. once in a while, it's still brought out, mainly to make me a target of blame and ridicule, but even then, it quickly fades into a recollection of other aspects of freshman year. After all, there are more pleasant things to remember than an outbreak of disease. One never knows when some new eponymous plague will let its rats (at least in the AMRs) loose upon an unsuspecting campus.
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