Moral of the Story: Don't Get Mono

If you didn't know from reading a previous post, I ended up getting mono this semester. If you HAVEN'T read that post, you should go read it. "paperwork, Paperwork, PAPERWORK!" This one is meant to give you a little more detail as to what went on.

My second semester of college was going great! Unfortunately, I was not cast in the musical (Drowsy Chaperone) but I was asked by the artistic director of a local theatre to come and audition for their production of Oklahoma! He also happened to be the director of the show as well. I thought, "why not?" I didn't have any other show at the time but the performances would conflict with three of the rehearsals with our later straight play (Our Town). I did it anyway and was offered the role of Laurey.

A few weeks into the semester and rehearsals, I got really sick. I was dizzy and had a terrible fever. I ignored it for a while but finally went into the doctor. I was diagnosed with a sinus infection and was given an antibiotic.

After the five days of antibiotics I was feeling better but not great. My fever had not gone away, it had actually gotten worse, I could barely walk, my body ached, and I was completely exhausted. I went back to the doctor and got tested for mono. Sure enough, I had it. And there's no medication for it so I had to just live through it.

Because I was not well enough to drive, I let the girl who I drove to rehearsals drive instead. She would drive my car and I would sleep both there and back. It worked except that I was still very dizzy during the run. I would tend to have to either lean on either our Curly or Jud (depending which scene it was) or sit on the floor. I think the thing that sucked the most was that we were only about two weeks away from opening. After a while, the director decided to cast an understudy just to be safe. She was never needed. I performed all of tech week and three weeks of performances (14 show) with mono. I think it was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to overcome in all of my theatre experiences.

One of the biggest things I learned from having mono was that I had to really pick and choose what I was able to do. I'm sure you're thinking "Well duh! Schoolwork comes before everything." and that's normally how it would be for me; except this time it wasn't... I started to realize that once I fell asleep at night (around 11:30pm), I was out until around 2:30 pm the next day. This means that I slept through all of my classes. For three or four weeks. And then I actually was feeling "good enough" to go to rehearsals. My professors definitely weren't happy that I was going to rehearsals and performances but not going to class. I just thought I would try to get back into the swing of things and not restart everything all at once. This meant doing things when I felt good enough to. It also meant that classes were out of the question.

As I said in a previous post:

Moral of the story - Don't get mono.

-Jackey