How To Survive Mononucleosis (While Infecting Those Around You)
STEP #1: Contract the illness at the most inconvenient time.
Why would you want to spend your well-deserved vacation lying on a beach, tossing back a few daiquiris and sucking face with the girl of your dreams when you could be lying in bed and popping Advil every six hours? Mono is fun!
“How can mono be fun” you might ask? Well if Dane Cook can be ‘hilarious’ and FOX News can be considered ‘informative journalism’, than mononucleosis can certainly be fun. But fair warning, it’s just an overall degrading disease. Strongly incapacitating and disabling, Mono is like waking up with a large man choking you after you just spent two hours on a treadmill. So unless you are into that, which god knows I am, you probably feel like shit and more importantly tired. Very tired. So tired that you can’t even make the far-too-easy joke about your inability to swallow and instead resort to collapsing into your pillow and wallowing in a pool of self-pity and sweat. “No,” you say. “Not me! I couldn’t possibly have this!” As is tradition in the Millenial faith, you attempt to prove or disprove your diagnosis by consulting Dr. Google. And after hours of online forums, yahoo answers, and Web MD consulting you begin to realize the terrifying truth: That’s right, there is no magic pill! No mono-be-gone medicine to make the pain go away. Mono is a virus, which means its just like that family member who you begrudgingly invite to events and is always the last person to leave. The only thing you can do is drink plenty of fluids and wait it out. “That’s fine,” you say, “Patience is a virtue.” But then you stumble upon startling realization #2: it can last WEEKS! Not your typical common cold eh? So prep the acetaminophen and Chloraseptic spray, pick out your favorite crappy movies and easily digestible foods because you’ve got Mono! It’s gonna be one hell of a ride!
STEP #2 Fever Dreams: When Nocturnal Emissions become Terrifying!
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s the Indian God Vishnu starring in a rap music video set in a circus tent. Sound random? Sound crazy? Well cue up the auditory and visual hallucinations because you are in the fever dream stage of mono! Imagine your body is a warzone. On one side you have the virus, infecting and pillaging all the healthy villages (cells) in your body. On the other side are your defense systems of antibodies and white blood cells. So your body fights back causing your temperature to rise, hence a fever. You’ll experience extreme hot temperatures and extreme cold temperatures all at the same time! How exciting! There’s nothing more fun than dying of heat and shivering from the bitter cold all at the same time! It’s exhausting no doubt. Eventually you curl up in the fetal position and drift off into a peaceful, blissful, sleep…
Cue the Metallica Music because that blissful sleep is anything but. You’ve had nightmares but this takes dreaming to a whole new level. Imagine a dream where nothing is set. You get comfortable with an environment and then in some sort of twisted ADHD sprawl, your world dissolves and melts in front of you. One minute you are sitting in the living room of your childhood home, unwrapping Christmas presents. A big, shiny, red box is sure to contain the Power Ranger toy you’ve always wanted. But then the Christmas tree catches on fire and you remember that you’re Jewish and don’t actually celebrate Christmas. You tear away at the wrapping paper of the big red box to reveal not a Power Ranger, but an old-timey TV playing a tape of your grandparents having sex on loop.
You begin to gouge your eyes out until blood pours out. But a sudden flash of white shines brightly and fades to reveal your new destination: an absolutely breathtaking tropical beach. This is the type of vivid fever dream that you were looking for! You admire this breathtaking scene and recline on a chair-bed when the girl you had made plans to spend your vacation with saunters up from the beach, shimmering water cascading down the curves of her bikini and she smiles at you with the same piercing blue eyes that captivated you in the first place. Without a word, she straddles your waist and removes her top and for a moment, you believe you’ve succumb to your illness, died, and gone to heaven. This was all you wanted after all – the sun, the beach, and the beautiful woman with whom you’ve fantasized about.
You met her several months ago in one of those adolescent fairy tales — a stranger just passing through whose mutual attendance at a family event proved to be more than enough justification for a romantic rendezvous. You share a quick night of awkward tongue wrestling – the way only a 14 year old can – and proceed to trade texts, messages, and phonecallls for the next 4 months, hoping for another excuse to see one another. That’s when the universe provides a solution – Spring Break. Plans are made, schematics are drawn, fantasies run unimpeded.
Yet mono and its fever dreams can make a mockery of even the best-laid plans. Behind the topless beauty straddling you, the sky grows eerily gray. Off in the distance, a massive tidal wave approaches the shore. The beautiful woman on top of you transforms into the Crypt Keeper as you wake up in a bed covered in every bodily fluid imaginable. So when your mom asks you the following morning why the washing machine was running at 3 am, think of a good excuse. Something tells me that “because I’m a legal adult who shit the bed” isn’t going to cut it.
STEP 3: Spread the Love! Or at least try…
Mono is also known as “the kissing disease”. Which means if you are lucky, you will contract it in a fun way. If you are unlucky, then your clearly ill, mono-infested friend will sneeze directly into your open mouth without warning and any plans you had of getting with that crush on spring break go away in a phlegm-filled instant.
The bottom line is it's easier to get and even easier to give. So every medical professional would advise you to “not swap saliva or bodily fluids with anyone for the next 3 weeks.” So herein lies the problem – you have an illness that now prevents you from kissing and yet you’ve scheduled your romantic adolescent romp for a specific window of time. Ah the irony of an illness contracted by kissing that prevents you from kissing.
So what to do? Well, the intelligent thing would be to cancel your rendezvous and hope that the universe provides another window for you to consummate your love. However, this doesn’t take into account the absolutely repulsive and morally bankrupt mind of a horny 14-year-old boy.
The option you’re considering is called “lying” and it seems to be pretty popular. The hormonal monsters in your brain work around the clock, writing out formulas on a whiteboard looking for a solution that allows you to lie about your mono while still being a good person:
“What if we drink a whole bottle of cough syrup before so that the symptoms go away?”
“What if we don’t make out and just use our hands?”
“What if we just say it’s a common cold?”
But no matter how hard they try, they all arrive at the same solution – if you go through with intentionally spreading mono just to get some ass, you are in fact a piece of shit. This brings us to…
STEP 4: GIVE UP AND BE MISERABLE.
All that’s left to do is to text her and tell her you won’t be able to hang out and fulfill the fantasy that you’ve built up in your heads. Instead, you’ll have to drown your sorrows into a bowl of matzah ball soup – nature’s mono remedy – and hope that your paths will cross again one day. Until then, you’ll dream of that beach, the bikini top lying in the sand and hope that one day the clouds won’t roll in.