Category Archives: Wellness

I woke up sick this morning. I haven’t worked out yet if I have a cold or the flu; I’m supremely groggy at the moment. If I could, I would be in bed right now, but unfortunately I have six papers due in these two weeks, none of which are completed at the moment. Stress levels are high.

I’m working on one of them right now which is a lot more work than I originally anticipated. Instead of slogging three essays off this long weekend, I am still on this same, one paper due tomorrow.

Nothing like deadlines to keep me working, though. Not only have I been tottering about the house doing chores — my parents are visiting in the next few days, so I need to undertake spring-cleaning of epic proportions before then — I’ve also completed my course evaluations! I’m not sure why I feel so proud of this, but I’m glad I won’t be receiving any more emails bugging me to complete them; my inbox is already overflowing with messages I need to respond to.

Back to my essay I go.

Being a sick student at this time of year is the worst.

Ever since my department offered a second time to nominate me for a scholarship, I thought maybe there was a chance of me at least applying.

You see, to eligible for a merit-based scholarship at UBC, you need to have taken the full courseload of 27 credits or have proper documentation as to why you didn’t. I took 24 credits last year. I spent most of this morning trying to find proper documentation but — as I suspected all along — I couldn’t get it.

My health was rather poorly last year, particularly in the first term. Actually, it’s fair to say my health has always been rather poor throughout my life and that I’m not much better at this moment, given my current cold/flu-like symptoms. It’s usually nothing major, but frequent small bouts of illnesses, which last at least a week up to a month, can really wear a person down.

In Hong Kong, such illnesses usually resulted in doctors giving me antibiotics (which I am consequently now immune to). In Canada, doctors usually tell me to go home and rest up. While this is probably better for humanity at large (i.e. I am not one of those who will develop a super-bug anymore), it does mean I gave up going to the doctor’s and now have not much of a medical record to speak of.

So, I have an insufficient medical record to warrant documentation ‘proving’ my reason for doing one course fewer than the full courseload, further complicated by the fact I went to more than one clinic in the past year or so, no chance of applying, a very persistent cough, and some other unrelated health issue I have an appointment for next Monday. Which all boils down to:

Take care of yourself so you don’t have to make decisions about what you can and can’t do based on your health. Or rather, what I mean is, you don’t want your poor health to limit what you do; you want to be strong enough to go after what you want.

And if you are sick, go to your family doctor. If you don’t have one (like me), I heard that if you go to the same doctor at a walk-in clinic four times, that doctor becomes your doctor, so do that instead. Having one person see you is many times better than having six when you’re trying to find your records.