One morning freshman year, I woke up with a fever of 102 degrees. Frantic and feeling awful, I called my mom. She didn’t pick up at first—8AM Eastern Time is 5AM Pacific, a time zone difference that I have grown to hate in moments like these. Student Health didn’t have any available appointments until 4PM, and I didn’t have any Tylenol or other medicine to bring down my fever.

I curled up in a ball in my dorm room after sending my mom a desperate text and waited for her to wake up and call me back.

In this moment, I thought about how different it was for my older brother, who went to college just fifteen minutes away from home. When he got sick in his freshman year, my parents simply drove over to campus and brought him to urgent care. Here I was, waiting for my mom who lived on the other side of the country to call me back and say… what, exactly? How could she help me?

When my mom finally woke up an hour later, we made a plan. She googled an urgent care place that wasn’t too far away and sent me some money to take an Uber. She made sure I knew where my insurance information was and checked in with me over the next couple of hours to make sure I was okay. I saw a doctor, who determined I had the flu, and sent a prescription for Tamiflu to the nearest CVS. Also, the doctor told me I should get some Tylenol (yeah, I know, thanks for the insight).

See a doctor, check. But wait. How was I going to pick up my prescription? I picked up the phone to call my mom again. I was in no shape to walk a mile to the pharmacy, so she helped me finally figure out Emory’s shuttle system. I hopped on a bus to CVS and picked up my prescription, some Tylenol and NyQuil, and other essentials—anybody else drink Gatorade and Ginger Ale when sick?

Okay, medicine, check. There was one more thing… I had a midterm in two days. I had planned to study for it, but my brain was so foggy and I was so tired that any information I tried to read would have gone in one ear and out the other, or whatever the equivalent is. I hadn’t gotten the doctor to write me a note to get out of classes because it was the weekend and I didn’t have any classes, nor did I understand the complex process for getting excused from exams. When I woke up with a high fever ten minutes before my exam started on Monday morning after a night of very little sleep, there was only one thing I could think to do. RUN. And so I ran. I took my Neuropsychology midterm with a fever of 103 degrees. Luckily, I passed.

Retrospectively, I probably should have gone back to sleep, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20, right?

Parents, when you think about your child going off to school, I can understand the worries going through your mind about moments like these. You don’t want to watch your child struggle and be unable to help.

I want to offer a counter argument. I learned from struggling. First and foremost, I learned that I shouldn’t prioritize my classes over my health. I also learned how to navigate urgent care by myself (after that midterm, I went back to the doctor because my fever still hadn’t gone down). Lastly, even though my mom was far away, I learned that I could still lean on her if I needed to.