The next night, Wednesday, was a mandatory "night off" from rush for everyone. I was pretty happy things were going well with rush, and had started working on getting my parents "warmed up" to the idea. "I'm rushing, but I'm only interested in one fraternity - annnd I probably won't get a bid, buuut if I do..."
So I decided that night that I wanted to attend a lecture that I had heard about and went to the student center at 7pm. It was in a big conference room in the student center, and there were at least 200-250 people in the audience. Everything was fine until about 30 minutes into the lecture I started feeling kinda...funny. Not funny ha-ha, but funny...bad. I really began to feel nauseous, and started wondering how I could gracefully exit this room full of people (I was sitting near the front and not by the aisle -DUMBASS!).
So while I've been trying to figure out how to discreetly make a graceful exit, my digestive track has approached a level of DEFCON 4. I make a mad (non-discreet) dash out of the room, hand over my mouth in the international symbol of "OH GOD I"M GOING TO HURL!!!"
I make it just to the men's room before heaving my dinner, lunch, and spleen up.
I take a few minutes to recover, wash my face, and decide I'd better start back to my dorm room.
I threw up 4 more times on the way back to the dorm.
I threw up 17 times total that night, to the point I was dry heaving.
My jackass, child-molesting RA (there is another story there) tried to write me up for being drunk since I was hurling loudly in the bathroom. My roommate, a perfect 4.0-never missed a class in his life- student, fled our dorm room and slept next door, terrified he would catch the bubonic plague that I so obviously had.
The next morning, when the BSU Health Center (affectionately known as the "Death Center") opened, my next door neigbor Mike drove me over. As soon as the doctor saw me, he ordered me quarrantined in the infirmary.
They let me call my parents to let them know, and gave me some medicine that knocked my ass out.
I woke up five hours later, and my parents were there. How
fast did you drive? I asked my father, knowing that my mom would have had to call my dad from work, met him at home and driven straight up from St. Louis.
Normally it took five hours just to make the drive from St. Louis!
So, to make a long story short, it turned out I had some strain of highly contagious stomach flu. They isolated me to prevent an outbreak, but it was too late. They kept me in the infirmary for three days, meaning that I had missed rush.
I figured my chances of getting a bid now were pretty much zilch.
