As students, we always wish that we could miss school. That part of you that wakes up the morning before your AP Stats test hoping that there is some natural disaster on its way. Practically begging the universe to create any scenario where you get to miss school, even at times wishing illness upon yourself so you can stay home. You hear it constantly in the halls: “I want to go home.”, “I wish I wasn’t here right now.”, constant prayers to a multitude of deities for escape. So two weeks ago when I woke up with a sore throat, why did I immediately start stressing out?

Stress is a close friend of mine, as I assume it is to most highschoolers, so waking up stressed is a common occurrence for me. This kind of stress, the kind that comes with waking up with any ailment, is different. It’s that “What if?” kind of stress. What if this sore throat isn’t just lack of hydration? What if it’s the flu? What if it’s a disease? That is the train of thought I immediately followed when I woke up on August 16th.

All of this stress derives from two simple facts: if I am sick, I have to stay home and if I have to stay home, I have to make up my work. Now, for me, work has two meanings, my actual job and the never ending list of assignments I have to complete for school. Not being able to go to my actual job, as a person who doesn’t rely on my personal income to survive, was a nice break. Having to miss school, as great as it sounds, is much more difficult than being at school. Missing school means doing work without explanation from your teacher, or having to pile it on top of the previously mentioned load of work when you get back. 

Personally, I am in favor of pushing off work until I get back. I get sick at least once or twice a year, so now that I’m a senior, I’ve got missing school down to a routine. However, that really only applies to missing three or four days, max. Unless you count that one year that I didn’t get the flu shot, I’ve never had any major illnesses that took me out of school for very long, and honestly the over-achiever part of myself often forces me to come back to school before I’m ready, or even just push through it and attend class. These past two weeks were very different.

That morning that I woke up with a sore throat was the start of a two week illness, in which I attended urgent care three times and toward the end had so much swelling in my face that I was on a liquid-only diet. The details of my suffering aren’t important, but for the sake of argument it is important to know that during this time I was in constant pain and very weak. For the first few days, I didn’t worry too much about the work I was missing and was just focused on getting better. Before I was fully ready, I went back to school after two days. However, that Saturday I got home from work and knew that I had pushed myself too far. This kick-started the rest of my time off and after a few more days I realized that I couldn’t push work off anymore. In my delirious state I wrote almost incoherent essays and dozed off with my laptop in my lap waking up intermittently to continue work.

The struggles I faced during those weeks and the amount of work I have to do over the next three days is how I came to the conclusion that students don’t actually want to miss school. We may say it all the time, we may make our pleas for freedom, but in the long run staying home is a tremendously more difficult task than begrudgingly getting through the school day.