Mia Rose Kohn

I decided to put my bellowing cough to bed last Friday in a last-ditch effort to cure the infamous Yague. A nap after my first period class could only help my case…no? Two missed classes and a stood-up coffee chat later, I awoke from my Rip Van Winkle slumber, unaware of the time and entirely disconnected from my faculties. 

My suite has turned into a quarantine zone. Coughs can be heard from my entry way at all times of the day. Mountains of tissues are á la mode for dorm decor this season. The Freshman Flu is alive and well, and lives on in me, you and probably everyone on this campus. 

Symptoms of the illness are brutal and seemingly neverending. You’ll be left with a resounding cough that lasts beyond all comprehension — despite copious doses of robitussin — a sore throat and other ailments. Omar Rahman ’29 complained, “my eyes were so red that my professors gave me side eye in class.” 

There are likely a few different viruses circulating around campus, but they seem to all end in the same conclusion: an excuse to skip lectures and sleep in. 

Due to these varying viruses, the Yague changes each year like the flu. Sophomores: you thought you served your time last year? Think again, you’re never immune. In a way, the sickness is a celebration of our unique summers: where they took us and what we brought home, a melting pot of our microbiomes. 

The first murmurs of the Yague originate post-Camp Yale, with increasingly more people contracting the illness after welcome week parties and gatherings. It seems to spread to party abstainers during and following the first week of classes, and everyone has come in contact by the fourth week of the semester. 

Rehabilitation is undeniably the most unforgiving phase. Symptoms can last the full semester — if you continue to neglect your immune system. Although some may switch their drink of choice from a vodka cran to cough syrup on a Friday night, others would rather suffer Saturday’s consequences and attend Mykosnu dressed as a super-spreader. 

As I write this, lymph nodes still swollen, I realize the freshman flu unites and conquers more than it divides. I feel an empathetic twang when I hear a resounding cough echo around Starr Reference room, and when a classmate has to excuse themselves for the second time during a seminar to grab a tissue. There’s solidarity in the sheer number of us that have contracted the illness, “my friends and I have trauma bonded over the recovery time,” Kai Zou ’29 confessed. 

As you avoid — or recover from — the Yague this season, use it as an excuse to check in on the people around you. Swap meal invitations for Musinex-runs, skip that lecture in the name of recovery and be kind to the overworked Yealth staff. 

There’s community in this contagion: you might never know all 6 thousand undergraduates, but your immune system does.