Christian Science Medicine

You know what I find rather annoying? The medical system here at Cornell.

It seems that Cornell
Does everything it can to
Say "just don't get sick"


If you feel sick, you can go to Gannett, the health center on campus. Except if you go to Gannett, chances are you will get more sick, since that's where they keep all of the diseased pigs (not literally). Oh, and anything you do will take forever, since it's still a medical facility and that's a given. And did I mention that it's only open during work hours, and is not open on weekends? So to make up for that fact, they have a 24 hour on-call nurse, who will call you back within 30 minutes after you call them. She will then proceed to go through the list of questions that you could find almost verbatim on webmd.com, and will tell you everything that results from that query, minus the diagnosis.

Yesterday, I was feeling sick with chest pains, so I called. The entire time, it was as though I was being interrogated.

Nurse: "Is it a pressure-pain or a stabbing pain?"
Me: "I swear, I don't know! I don't know!"
Nurse: "That's not an acceptable answer. Answer the question damnit!"

In the end, she suggested that I call an ambulance. The problem with calling an ambulance? Well, first of all, it means calling 911 for something that might just be something do with gas or whatnot. And then you have to go to the Cayuga Medical Center. Which is about 40 minutes away from here and in the absolute middle of nowhere. And you have to go to the ER. So to do that makes it an all-day (or all-night) excursion, something that a student here really can't handle.

So all-in-all, between Gannett's fail of service, and Cayuga Medical Center's fail of convenience, Cornell fails at providing medical assistance to the 14,000 students here. And they wonder why swine flu was such a big deal. In any case, if you're sick here, unless you're ready to waste an entire day on hospital trips, you'll feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis- helpless.