you were just trying to get that summer bod

Disclaimer: The writer hasn’t actually tested any of her theories about Uris pool and only has a few shaky sources to confirm her theory.

It’s finals season and sickness is bound to be spreading across campus like the plague, while our immune systems are at their weakest and we’re all crammed into the same libraries, breathing the same recirculated air for hours on end. However, it seems that something else is spreading beyond the usual finals cold: mono. Infectious mononucleosis is characterized by fever, sore throats, enlarged lymph nodes, and exhaustion in most cases, but sometimes a carrier of the illness might not even have these external signs. But if you have found yourself more exhausted than usual from your run up Low Steps or find that swallowing your weekly SweetGreen is a little harder than usual, you might be infected with mono. One question you should ask yourself though: have you been to Uris Pool recently?

Maybe you had decided to get in shape just in time for summer break, so you could wow your ex from back home or post some seriously good content on your instagram feed, so you thought that a few laps in Uris would count as cardio without having to sweat. But now you’re sweating through your bedsheets during finals and your prayers for the sweet release of death have only heightened! The lesson learned is to never exercise again!

Mono is usually characterized as the ‘kissing disease,’ being spread through saliva, but with all sorts of gross bodily fluids being leaked into Uris pool on the daily, this location is a good contender for being the source of this epidemic that’s subtling making it’s way through Columbia’s students. And while there’s nothing the folks here at Bwog can do about this supposed monospot, what we can suggest is drinking lots of gatorade, getting your eight hours, downing a whole bottle of ibuprofen, and realizing that you were never a fit person in the first place.