Student Life (and Death)

Dr. Isis, in her new digs, is writing about teachers letting themselves into students' lives. She's looking at it through the lens of writing, but there are...never mind, I'll just tell the story.

Fall semester of my sophomore year of college, two things happened that shouldn't be related. I got a gamma globulin shot, and I officially changed majors. The event that linked the two was the death of Jon, my buddy and lab partner.

Jon was an unrepentant geek. Band geek, physics geek, punner, the kind who taught himself to flip a pen around his fingers and would practice in class even though the pen would occasionally skitter noisily away. He was the kind of geek who crushed on female friends without any expectation that there could be more.

Anyway.

One weekend Jon went home to do laundry and see the family. He didn't come back Sunday night because he thought he had the flu. A few days later he was in the hospital, then moved to the local university hospital, comatose and in need of a new liver. It was hepatitis.

I thank whoever decided that the hospital needed large waiting rooms. Jon would have been gratified to see how many of us huddled together there. He would have understood, too, as the wait went on for days and people drifted back to school except for an hour or two here or there. The three of us who hung around except to sleep and shower and work when we had to were the ones who had already been through bad stuff, who knew that the strain was survivable and ultimately better than not knowing what was happening. Jon would have stayed too.

It was a week before a donor liver was found. Jon's kidneys had shut down and he was on dialysis. Neither Jon's family nor those of us who'd stayed told the others that we could read the doctors' faces by that point. Somehow, those told a story that the percentages couldn't. They told us how critical the next few hours were.

The surgery went well, technically, but the liver never started working for Jon. His body rejected it, as sluggishly as it was doing everything else. Dialysis got more difficult as his veins stopped functioning properly. Somewhere in there, I made the mistake of telling one of the hopeful people that it was over, Jon was dying. I don't think he forgave me.

Then Jon died, about a week after the transplant.

I think that was when they finally got around to asking which of us might have had close enough contact to be in danger. The night before Jon had gone home, we'd been out for beers with another friend. (Yes, I was barely eighteen. So sue me.) This friend was all but bawling over his impossible love, and Jon and I took turns stealing his beer and drinking it when he wasn't paying attention. We still had to prop him up to walk him home, but we kept him away from dangerously drunk. I earned a gamma globulin shot for that. So did our friend, but he also got the girl in the middle of all the stress.

No one, by the way, ever figured out why Jon's liver went bad. It wasn't any of the known strains of hepatitis.

Going back to classes was hard. I dropped multivariable calculus without regret. I was taking it from the incomprehensible teacher who'd written the incomprehensible book, and having Jon as a study partner was the only reason I hadn't already decided to take it at a different school. I took an incomplete in optics, meaning to go back when I could face the lab without my lab partner. I don't remember what my third class was, something where the grade was dependent on midterm, final, and papers. It was flexible and not something Jon was taking with me.

I woke up the first morning I was fully back on campus to discover that there was a test scheduled in my fourth class--psychology--in three hours. I'd skipped one test, as allowed under the rules of the class, the first week Jon was in the hospital. I couldn't skip this one. I went to the professor to ask for a one-day extension. I think I even managed not to cry in his office.

He said no. He explained that the ability to drop a test was there to cover bad situations and that it wouldn't be fair to other students to make a special rule for me. He, not unkindly, suggested I start studying.

I did. I read the chapters I'd missed, even though I wanted to curl up into a tiny ball instead. I barely finished them, having to go back so many times because I realized I wasn't taking anything in. The test was a nightmare. I knew I wasn't doing well. I couldn't concentrate, and I could barely remember what I'd read. I hated my professor and wondered how life could pile one unfairness on top of another.

When the tests came back, mine had an "A" at the top and no other marks on the page.

I may have learned more in that class than in any other I've ever taken.

All of which is a very long way of responding to Dr. Isis's concerns about doing students an injustice in taking their personal situation into account. It certainly doesn't have to be that way. It can even be an opportunity to help them develop.