Stop, Drop,Then What?
The hours before 11 AM on the weekend shouldn’t even bother to exist for college students. I mean really, most of us don’t even know what the meal commonly referred to on weekdays as breakfast, even looks like on Saturday’s and Sunday’s. Oversleeping is also a thing of the week and is often eliminated from the weekenders jargon, but this past Sunday morning, it made quite the comeback in my life.
On this particular night, I had for some reason, chosen to sleep on the all too well known Loyola provided furniture, which in many ways resembles the scratchy tweed jacket my grandmother bought me for Christmas five years ago. Why I chose to sleep on some material for eight hours, that I wouldn’t even wear to please my own elderly 82-year-old grandmother, is still a mystery to me. After realizing that I overslept, I sprang up from the couch. When I say sprang, I mean my body hit Olympic qualifying high jump status when I left that piece of furniture. I immediately felt something was off and quickly flashbacked to that two liter of mountain dew that I may or may not have consumed by myself just hours prior at work. While en route to the bathroom. Yes, that was an incomplete sentence you just read, but don’t worry it serves a purpose. You see walking to the bathroom is all I remember.
Apparently, while gallivanting to the porcelain throne, I fainted, and judging by the grapefruit shaped bump on my head, I had become all too well acquainted with the ground. On first approaching my motionless body, my roommate Meaghan, for some reason, thought I was joking. Why Meaghan would think that I would voluntarily lay on the un-vacuumed carpet of our apartment, that I myself have spilled many of times on, for fun, is yet another question I’m still asking myself. After a few seconds, she got the hint that my Casper the Friendly Ghost complexion was no act, and she had no idea what to do. (If your wondering, this is what you should do if you should ever find yourself in this same predicament.)
My other roommate, Reilly, weeks before, had sliced her hand open while opening a can of Beefaroni, and she truthfully had not the slightest idea what to do either. Simple things like having band-aids for her cut or ice cubes to relieve my pulsating head are materials that we may have in the comforts of our home, but lack here in the dorms.
Though I quickly regained consciousness after my brush with death, I still must ask myself, what can be learned from this situation? For one, I know drinking large quantities of caffeinated beverages is never a good idea. But in all seriousness, I have to honestly say that in the midst of an emergency, we as students are unprepared in many ways. As I laid, in what now is referred to as my “stupefy-ied” state, the next course of action if I didn’t awake on my own was probably to start making deals with the Devil. Not very practical, but I must admit, I’m not sure what I would have done either.
I’m sure emergencies such as these occur every day and I think that we as students need to ask ourselves, are we prepared for crisis? You never know, one minute you could be walking to the bathroom, and the next minute you could have a snow globe sized lump on your head and have no recollection of how it got there.
