ILLUSTRATIONS BY JESSICA PENFOLD



In between all the partying, making friends and doing a miniscule amount of work you will have to do to scrape a pass in your degree, you will also have your time taken up with a thing called “being ill”.

Once you are taken out of the sterile test tube of the family home and are exposed to the myriad health risks that university lifestyle throws up, you’re really going to have to start to look after yourself properly.

Uni is a big festering, dirty shit pit of student digs, going out every night for weeks on end, eating food that isn’t really fit for human consumption and gorging yourself on bad drugs and cheap vodka.

If you ever bother to go to your lectures, sitting in a big room with your fellow students and having germs pumped around a confined room by dirty air conditioning doesn’t help too much either. In short, going to university is going to make you ill. Here’s what you can look forward to.

STDs
With the brave new world of the first year free-for-all fanny-buffet that cheap drinks and awful pop music in the student union brings comes new danger. In theory, every one goes at it like rabbits at university, but in reality after the first few months most people end up chained up in relationships or are put off sex having caught a hefty dose. There is more chlamydia going around your average uni than in a brothel, probably because hookers get checked more often. There were 121,986 cases reported across the UK last year, an impressive 150 per cent increase since 1998. While the symptoms are hard to spot and occasionally border on non-existent you may start pissing fire and passing gross discharge. A|so watch out for the American exchange students because they are the ones who are most likely to have genital warts (we don’t know the reason for this but Yank students have higher levels of genital warts than Brits. Fact). Once you get warts you have the virus for life. Treating them involves a lengthy, repetitive and painful freeze/burn combo on your genitals. There are a tonne more STDs you can get and none of them are good. The best advice is to just keep it in the bag.

MUMPS
More people are getting mumps in 2008 than ever before. Due to lower immunity levels among young adults there was a five-fold increase in cases of mumps from 2003 to 2004. It’s a virus and spreads nicely when you have 200 dirty, room-bound 19-year-olds living in a hermetically sealed block. If your glands swell up and your balls follow suit, you could end up infertile or deaf, so when the halls administration freak out and make everyone report to the dining hall to get a jab just go and do it. It’s probably the only thing you will see executed efficiently during your three years of university life. Mumps is spread by micro droplets of gob in the air from coughs and sneezes, so there isn’t much you can do to avoid it, except refraining from liking sick peoples’ spit, and washing your hands a lot. You may look like Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets but at least you won’t be frothing like an extra in a Romero movie.   

DIET
People’s excuses for eating woefully for three years are usually something to do with good food being “too expensive”. This is utter bullshit. It costs a lot more to buy takeaways, sweets and shitty microwave ready meals than it does to go to the local greengrocers once a week and buy a load of fruit. It sounds a bit gay, but the whole five-a-day thing really works. Similarly, things like vegetables and wholegrain rice and pasta are pretty affordable, especially en masse. Not eating like a Glaswegian dole monkey will help stave off most minor ailments and may even go some way toward giving your skin some sort of colour, rather that the typical waxen student pallor. Eating well is the best way to avoid getting ill and takes zero effort. Try it. If you are cripplingly lazy then just buy smoothies and have a glass a day. Good luck with the heartburn though.

MENINGITIS
This is a biggie. Meningitis is probably one of the most dangerous things you can catch at uni. There were over 1,000 cases of meningitis in the UK diagnosed last year with a 10 per cent mortality rate amongst sufferers. Considering that Meningitis UK believes the disease to be rife among students and without your mum there to fret over you and check you for rashes every time you have a headache you will probably just assume you have flu for the first week. It’s worth looking like a pussy and asking your flatmates to check your back for rashes if you feel really ill, otherwise you could end up with your brain swelling and a nasty case of being dead. If you have a killer headache, a fever, stiff neck, and you are chucking up you may want to rush to the doctors. But remember that not all sufferers develop the infamous rash, so if your other symptoms match, get moving.

SPORTS INJURIES
If you are good enough / care enough about playing extremely competitive games of rugby then you can join your departmental team. You get to wear a special tracksuit and say things like, “Dude, those wankers from the geography 2nd XV are going to get totally annihilated tomorrow, yah.” But the whole uni sports thing really comes into its own when you hurt yourself. The people at the hospital give you crutches and you can hobble into lectures drawing extra attention to your sporting prowess as well as upping the chances of getting your dick into a sporty girl. Sports girls are sluttier than any other female student demographic, they like to go to parties with the rugby team and end up being filmed on camera phones sticking beer bottles in their asses. Crutches are like an aphrodisiac to them so, use them well.

PILES
People don’t like to talk about these much. They are one of the most unglamorous ailments you can have and come with zero sympathy from anyone but they are a very real ailment. You see, what most people don’t know is that something like one in four men get them at some point in their lives. Kids don’t get them much, but once you go to uni you had better stop trying to force shits out before going clubbing or farting on command, otherwise you will end up with painful little blood filled lumps popping in and out of your arse all day. These are exacerbated by spicy food, alchohol and sugar (aka your diet). Your best bet is to shit leisurely, hold back on the curries and avoid sitting on cold concrete, or radiators. Seriously. Piles suck ass.

DIARRHOEA
One of the real downsides of living on bad food and drinking vast quantities of cheap lager is the infamous “beeriod”. Fun as it seems to be downing pints all day, see how much fun it is pissing out of your arsehole for three hours the morning after. Uni is where a lot of people get into using stuff like Imodium. These are spiteful bombs of hate as far as your colon is concerned. In spite of the wondrous advances of modern science it seems there is still no such thing as a anti-diarrhoea pill that stops you pooing but doesn’t give you shit-block for four days. Taking Imodium means you will have to take a laxative later. Therein starts the never-ending cycle of chemically altered crapping. Best thing to do is just take it easy for 24 hours and resign yourself to a day in the toilet. No big deal. You might even actually get some reading done.

WEED PSYCHOSIS
About a fifth of dedicated weed smokers start freaking out at around 19 years old. We’re not talking about guys that have a cheeky spliff at a party now and then, we mean those kids who wake up and reach across for their vaporiser before rolling out of bed every afternoon. Those who made it through sixth form will either start losing it soon after freshers’ week, or they will be fine forever. The fragile ones start out getting irritable, jumpy and not being able to deal with the “green hangover” and end up walking around halls at 3 AM staring at their feet and scarpering into doorways if other sentient beings approach. An increasing number of students are ending up in therapy due to smoking skunk all the time. Cannabis users are 40 per cent more likely to develop a psychotic illness than non-users and heavy users are more than twice as likely to suffer mental illness. It is predicted that by 2010 25 per cent of all cases of schizophrenia will be cannabis related. This will lead to things like “long-term social interaction issues”, so if you don’t want to end up being the guy who spends the rest of his twenties in his room repeatedly checking that the windows are locked and that the oven is turned off then take it easy.

MENTAL HEALTH
People who suffer from mental health issues tend to keep them quiet at school. Similarly, it pays not to be too blatantly insane when you are looking for a job. But at uni the crazies love to party. They all come loony leaping out of the madhouse and head down to the bar for all to see. Usually they sort their shit out and become functioning human beings, but there’s always going to be one who you’re going to find nailing bacon to the bathroom walls. I knew a girl who ate ketchup in a bowl for her three meals a day and talked to her dead grandmother every night. As fun as it seems in halls to have an “eccentric” buddy, moving in with mad people can be tiring. If you are someone with issues: think carefully about whether three years in what is effectively a madhouse is right for you.