Picture this: you wake up in a pool of sweat, freezing cold, with a fever of 103, aches and pains all over your body, and a pounding headache. You call your dad, hes at work. You don't call your mom, because that will accomplish nothing but her getting all hysterical from miles away. So what do you do next? GWU would reccomend you go to student health. You call student health only to find out that "Sorry, there are no more appointments left today...come back tomorrow".
Well, I am sorry to report that is no fabrication or made up story. Yes everyone, this exact experience happened to myself.
Just when you thought I had enough complications as it was, I nearly became sick to my stomach when the receptionist on the other end casually told me, "there are no more appointments left". What does that even mean? There are no more appointments left? I had 103 fever! I live in a room with THREE other roommates and a dorm with 1,500 other kids! Who knows if I'll even make it to tomorrow!? What did she want me to do? Go to class? Clearly I needed an excuse from class and clearly I needed to see a doctor right away! Us students don't have our pediatricians (for those of us who are still freshman) and doctors nearby. We rely on GWU to take care of us when we are sick. AND this wasn't even a little sick, this was really, really sick! How can they just turn down a student like that?
My father was LIVID when he heard about this. We spend $50,000 to attend an institution that won't even care after it's students? No way. He called up student health, and after (what I assume transpired) blasting them for a half hour, they managed to squeeze me into their busy schedule.
Here I am, little me barely making it out of bed to go to the bathroom, flagging down a cab to .... K STREET? K STREET! This only gets better! What on EARTH were they thinking putting the health center all the way on K st! To make it easier for all those who are on crutches? Or those who have mono? They couldn't have picked ANY other building near everybody else for the health center? What is that not important enough? This was just another step in the most backwards process.
So, I get to the health center and the lady makes me fill out 100 different forms. Then I wait for an unestimated time in the waiting room, til a doctor is free. I was so sick in the waiting room that the nurse offered me a bed in the back to wait in. After passing out for an hour and half in a bed, a doctor comes in to see what was wrong with me. He gives me a throat culture, which tested positive for the flu. (Which only aggravated me more, because I got the flu shot).
He told me to take the rest of the week off from school to stay in bed. Hm well, that sounds great but...what about some medicine? Finally I built up the courage to say, "Last time I had the flu, my doctor prescribed me to Tamiflu and it worked really well". Thank god I spoke up because otherwise I wouldn't have gotten the medicine I needed.
I paid the 20 dollar copay fee and headed back to my dorm.
8 pills later, I am feeling a lot better. I am happy to report that I no longer have a fever, aches and pains, or a pounding migraine. You should all be thrilled to hear that I am also no longer contagious! But if you were wondering why I hadn't posted anything thus far, this is the reason.
The point of this blogpost is not just to vent to someone who I know for a fact won't interupt me while I am speaking, though I can't lie and say that that thought never crossed my mind. The point of this blogpost is just to see if someone could answer my question: does anybody care about me? Why did it have to take my dad, ruining his work day and using up his time, blasting the student health receptionist for someone to give me 10 minutes of their time? There should be someone on call at all hours of the day. With all these recent reportings of meningitis outbreaks on college campuses, shouldn't they be a little bit more concerned when a student living with 1,500 other students has 103 fever? I think so! What do you think? Please, somebody, anybody, give me an answer.
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3 comments:
UPD will transport you to Student Health if you are that sick.
There really is no support system here if you're sick. Freshman year, all of my friends who got sick went to student health, and got the same response: "You're sick. Take it easy until you're not, but you're in the last stages of whatever-it-is, so I'm not going to give you anything." Entirely unhelpful.
I'm just lucky that the one time I got really sick here, my then-roommate and then-boyfriend tag-teamed until I was better. Maybe it's a function of going to a large university, but you'd think they could do something more substantive to help students.
I don't go to school there, but at my school they have a health building on campus too.
However, I never go there except once a year to fill out forms showing I have medical insurance. Instead I go to a local hospital whenever I have a problem.
As far as I am concerned, the health areas on campus is just there for show. It was made to perhaps deal with a few minor outbreaks of colds or such that may happen during the year. I don't trust them to handle anything serious.
Typically I schedule an appointment at the local hospital and get in within a week, but that's just for regular visits.
If it is bad enough and you can't get an appointment right away, you might consider a visit to the emergency room of a local hospital.
I'm not sure how they deal with that sort of thing, but at 103 degrees - if a cold bath/shower won't do it on your own - you should really consider it.
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