The stomach flu is not the regular flu.

I got the stomach flu awhile ago. It was a great diet but I do not recommend it. In fact, remnants of it came back to haunt me a couple weeks after I 'recovered,' while I was trying to enjoy my vacation to Las Vegas (where I almost got trapped forever and ever). I seem to manage to catch awful diseases a little bit more frequently that I would like.

When I was in the middle of the worst of the illness (stuck in the bathroom), I was glued to my phone, searching WebMD and Google to make sure I wasn't actually dying, because I sure felt like it. I'm actually surprised I lived through it. In my search, I found out that stomach flu isn't actually the flu, it's gastroenteritis. WebMD said:

"No doubt you've heard people complain they have "stomach flu." You may have complained about it yourself after a bout of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea that seems to come from nowhere. In fact, though, stomach flu is a misnomer. There’s no such thing. The flu, influenza, is a respiratory infection that affects the lungs."

The flu is a virus that mimics a cold, except way worse.

A few of my friends tried to tell me I should have gotten a flu shot, but the flu shot wouldn't have helped. The flu shot protects against the real flu, the respiratory infection, not stomach irritation. Flu shot or not, I would still have been susceptible to the stomach flu (gastroenteritis). The more you know!

Standing in the cold for hours is a health risk.

The best time of year is Mizzou homecoming. We started the homecoming tradition 101 years ago and have been celebrating ever since! My friend and I decided that the occasion made this football game great to get painted up for.

In order to get painted up, you have to be one of the first 60 people in line for Tiger's Lair (the super awesome student cheering section). Often, being in the first 60 requires camping out and securing your place in line hours and hours and hours and hours before the game actually starts. Last year, this same friend and I camped out for nearly 20 hours to get painted for the 100th homecoming game.

Homecoming 2011 camp out

Painted up for homecoming 2011

So this year, we packed up our tent, blankets and snacks around 10 p.m. and headed to the stadium to wait in line all night. The only problem was the temperature outside was somewhere around 32 degrees. There was no one else there. Last year by that time, we had been waiting for about five hours and there were at least 25 other people in line.

I don't get enough sleep.

I came to this realization when I was falling asleep at work while drinking a Red Bull after finishing my coffee just two hours before. I think it's probably a bad sign when I need coffee and an energy drink to stay awake... and still find myself falling asleep. Then I did research to make sure that I'm scientifically not getting enough sleep, rather than just feeling lazy and wanting to sleep instead of working/studying/going to class.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, there isn't a 'magic number' for how much sleep you should get.

Not only do different age groups need different amounts of sleep, but sleep needs are also individual. Just like any other characteristics you are born with, the amount of sleep you need to function best may be different for you than for someone who is of the same age and gender.

Another reason there is "no magic number" for your sleep results from two different factors that researchers are learning about: a person’s basal sleep need – the amount of sleep our bodies need on a regular basis for optimal performance – and sleep debt, the accumulated sleep that is lost to poor sleep habits, sickness, awakenings due to environmental factors or other causes. Two studies suggest that healthy adults have a basal sleep need of seven to eight hours every night, but where things get complicated is the interaction between the basal need and sleep debt. 

According to WebMD, teenagers need about 9 hours and adults need 7 or 8. And Mayo Clinic - which I've never heard of, but their website says, "We comply with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information" so I'm assuming it's legitimate - says adults need 7 to 9 hours. Both also talk about sleep debt.

My conclusion is that I should get around 8 hours of sleep each night, and anything less contributes to my sleep debt while anything more will add to it. It's like the bank of sleep.

Lucky for me, I have this awesome application on my phone that tracks my sleep. It's the only app I've ever paid for and it was totally worth it. Basically, it tracks your sleep cycle every night and tries to wake you up at the end of a sleep cycle so you feel more rested. You put your phone on your bed every night when you go to sleep, set the alarm, and the sensors in the phone track your movement. I don't know how accurately it tracks movement, though. I've put my phone on my nightstand before (a solid, non-moving surface) and it's produced a graph. I've also woken up in the middle of the night and moved around and the graph will clearly show that I was moving around. Anyway, the more you're moving around, the less deep of a sleep you are in. You can set the alarm to go off in a window of 30, 20 or 10 minutes, but no matter what it will go off by the time you set the alarm for. For example, if you set your alarm for 7:30 a.m. and it senses you moving around in your sleep at 7:07, it will wake you up (in which case you can snooze until 7:30).

Even if that data isn't the most accurate, it's still really cool. It offers much more peaceful alarm tones that fade in, so you're not just all of a sudden woken up by a "BEEP BEEP BEEP" every morning. It also records when you go to sleep and when you wake up, gives you the total time you slept, and collects that data and gives you an average sleep time.

I currently have 82 nights recorded, but rather than go through every single one of those, I'll just go through the last week.

This was over St. Patrick's day weekend, so I was in Chicago for a parade. We left Sunday afternoon (this is the night right before), so I actually got to sleep in (sort of) for the first time in forever. 

I got an extra 42 minutes over 8 hours, so my sleep bank is up 42 minutes!

Unfortunately, I had a test on Tuesday (which is the day after this), and since I spent the weekend away from school I stayed up late to study, and then had to get up for my 8 a.m. You might think 6 a.m. is super early to wake up for a class two hours after, but I have to catch the bus at 7:10, because the next one isn't until 7:40 and that's not enough time to get to class if there is traffic.

I'm down 3 hours and 30 minutes, so my sleep bank drops to negative 2 hours and 48 minutes.

This is the night right before my test, so I was up really late studying again. Unfortunately I have early classes every single day, so I had to be up for my 9 a.m.

I'm down 3 hours and 30 minutes this night as well, so my sleep bank is negative 6 hours and 18 minutes.

I was up late working on all the homework I had been putting off to study for my test, so I was up late yet again.

I'm only down 2 hours and 50 minutes, so my sleep bank is at negative 9 hours and 8 minutes. I'm down more than a full nights sleep... pretty unfortunate for me.

I went to a Breathe Carolina concert this night, so now I'm just making poor life decisions. It was really fun though, so I think it was worth it.

 I'm down 2 hours and 52 minutes, so my sleep bank falls to negative 12 hours.

This is where it gets really bad. I went to The Hunger Games midnight premiere, so I didn't get home until really late, and then had to wake up for my 8 a.m. The movie was SO good, though.

I'm down 5 hours and 1 minute, so my sleep bank plummets to negative 17 hours and 1 minute.

It's important to note, though, that the week before this looked about the same, so I didn't actually start the week with a 42 minute excess of sleep.

Good thing it's spring break next week. If I sleep through the entire week, maybe I'll have enough sleep in my sleep bank to carry me through the rest of this semester.

My future career depends on trivial things.

...like being able to talk.

I recently recovered from some sort of terrible illness. I'm not sure what it was and the doctors didn't know either. My current theory is that I just got a cold from that one time when I slept outside in the cold and rain, and then a series of poor life decisions and no sleep escalated the sickness to high levels of awful. But I WebMD'd it, and that said it could be throat cancer. So, who knows?

Anyway, it started out with just a sore throat in the middle of the week. I had been sneezing so I just brushed it off as the beginnings of a cold. Then I woke up on the weekend and I started to lose my voice. I went to bed early that night thinking a good nights rest would probably be the cure. No. I woke up the next day and I really couldn't talk at all. I went to Noodles for dinner with my friends and I had to whisper my order to the guy. He laughed at me.

This is where it started to get pretty bad, because I had to work a KOMU desk shift that night. My responsibilities include updating the website, Facebook and Twitter, checking emails, and answering the phone and making calls. That last part is a pretty big part of the job, and not being able to talk really inhibited my ability to do that. I had to give away my shift and instead spent the evening eating soup, drinking tea and trying to be quiet.

Then came the turning point when I decided I really needed to go to the doctor. I was working on a story for my journalism class, so I had to make phone calls and interview people for it. I'm frantically trying to call people to find a source and ask people important questions except I can't talk. Super annoying. I needed to be better right then. So I went to the doctor.

I told the doctor I was dying and he really didn't take me seriously. He asked me if I would make it through this visit. I said I hope so, and luckily I did. They did a bunch of tests and sent me off with a prescription for some steroids that would make my throat inflammation go down. He also said it would make my voice come back.

The medicine did make my throat hurt less, but I still really couldn't talk. The doctor also said they would call the next day when my test results came in, but they didn't. I called them back three days later to tell them I wasn't better, and the lady on the phone was looking at my test results and was like, "Umm, well it looks like all the tests came back negative... sooooo it might be a virus... so you can come back in and we can check you out again... or you can just wait a few days and see what happens..." My response was pretty much, "Awesome, thanks doctors. Let me just continue to be sick and dying and croak at the people I need to talk to."

By this time I had been sick for an entire week and I was beginning to think I was never going to get my voice back. This would be a huge problem because I kind of want to be a TV reporter, which requires talking on television for quite a few people to listen. I'd have to change my entire major. I'd have to find something else I'm interested in. That would really, really suck.

Thankfully, I slowly began to recover. It only took about three weeks for my voice to fully come back. I can keep my major and still be a TV reporter.